KNOWLEDGE AND COMPETENCE MANAGEMENT IN PROJECT BASED ORGANIZATIONS- AN INTERNAL MARKET-BASED MODEL

Recently, project-based organizations (PBOs) received increasing attention as emerging organizational forms, in which projects tend to become the primary business mechanism for coordinating all the main business functions of the firm. The literature widely recognizes that these organizational structures face peculiar knowledge and competence management and organizational learning issues as well as the risk of internal strategic misalignment. This thesis addresses these issues by adopting a market-based approach to exchange knowledge and competencies within the boundary of the firm. This kind of approach looks promising as it addresses specific ineffectiveness of the PBOs mainly connected to the presence of the project dimension within the organization, where knowledge and competencies risk to be stuck, against the interest of the organization as a whole. A market-based approach promises to address, among the others, the motivational issue, which is one of the main brakes on the development of effective knowledge and competence management systems, by providing the users with a transparent mechanism based on the law of supply and demand. This approach has received certain attention from the literature over time, but it is generally under-researched in the project management and knowledge management literature, as well. This thesis aims to investigate this kind of approach in the context of large PBOs. First, a systematic literature review on knowledge and competence management in project-based organizations was developed. Second, based on the background of this study, I conducted some case studies in large PBOs in order to highlight the main knowledge and competence management issues currently faced by project-based organizations. Third, on the basis of the needs and requirements in terms of internal knowledge and competence management emerged from the interviews, I developed the conceptual framework of a market-based internal knowledge and competence management system and, fourth, I submitted it to the respondents of the first round of interviews in order to collect feedback. The feedback was negative. Confronting managers and employees with a market-based approach to exchange knowledge and competencies internally has brought to light aspects of the organizational culture that are deeply averse to this idea. The cases shedding light on several critical aspects of model applicability mainly due to technical, organizational, managerial and cultural issues. Fifth, an agent-based model of a knowledge market was designed and developed and the preliminary results of working simulations with different initial settings of selected parameters are presented in the thesis. The model is very general in nature and could be applied to describe both an internal corporate market and knowledge trading dynamics among firms in a knowledge ecosystem. This approach represents an innovative way to address the management of knowledge and opens the way for many future developments. The thesis is organized in five main parts: a systematic literature review on knowledge and competence management in PBOs, case studies and development of the knowledge market model, design and implementation of an agent-based model of a knowledge market and finally the analysis of data returned by the simulator.