The absorbing and sharing of knowledge within consultant companies - A study of the upcoming challenges when applying the EU taxonomy

Abstract

Consultant companies must remain competitive among competitors to maintain their position and survive in a market environment that has an ever-present change approach. Hence, consultant companies’ services must be up to date, which requires constant absorbing and sharing of new knowledge within the whole organization. Furthermore, such a process entails changes to integrate the new knowledge within the exciting operational services which a consultant company offers. Change processes are complex and command a long time, in the case of a consultant company, that involves an additional challenge when the employees need to spend most of their time on billable projects to remain profitable, which limits the time for development and learning of new knowledge. This paper aims to explore challenges consultant companies encounter within a change process to absorb and share new knowledge. This is achieved through a case study, where the consultant company Ramboll aims to apply a new regulation to direct investments towards sustainable economic activiteies, called the EU taxonomy. Moreover, this paper aims to propose some recommendations on how to handle these challenges. The interview findings from Ramboll’s employees, combined with the theoretical framework revealed the presence of the exploration-exploitation dilemma, where the absorbing and sharing of knowledge becomes suffering because of the profitability. Further, it was discovered that the success of change processes, depends more on the commitment of the employee than on the company’s absorptive capacity and that a lack of communication between divisions in Ramboll obstructs the learning of the EU taxonomy.