Researches On The Core Competence Of The Management Consulting Enterprises

With the deepening of the reform and opening-up, the demand for themanagement consultation was steadily increasing in China after the year of2000.However, some problems still exist in the management consulting industry, forinstance, small size of the enterprises, decentralization of business and lack of thecore competence. First of all, the thesis discriminates the connotations of theenterprise resources and capacity through the theory of resource base and gives thescientific definition to the concept of the core competence on such basis, and thenthe thesis does some researches on the characteristics of management consultingproducts as a result that there are four factors forming the core competence of themanagement consulting enterprise, among which the key is the process ofknowledge creation. On these grounds, the thesis puts forward to thecomprehensive evaluation model, cultivating methods and approaches of the corecompetence of the management consulting enterprise. Accordingly, it provides thetheoretical guides and evidences for the cultivation of the core competence of themanagement consulting enterprise. The paper consists of four parts as follows:The first part (chapters1and2) introduces the background and significance ofthe selected topic, the research object and methods and sums up the mainachievements on the research of the core competence at home and abroad.The second part (chapters3and4) makes a scientific and overall analysis of thecore competence of the management consulting enterprise on the basis of thetheories of enterprise resource base, enterprise capacity and knowledgemanagement, producing five main results:(1) the enterprise capacity refers to the organically integrated enterprise resources concretively reflecting on theproficiency of managing a certain business activity and possibility ofaccomplishing the activity. It is an essential power for the development of anenterprise. The key element in the system of the integrated core of the enterprisecapacity is the core competence of an enterprise;(2) the core competence of anenterprise possesses the knowledge attribute in nature;(3) the managementconsulting products have such features as informativeness, pertinence,innovativeness, incorporeality, the sense of customers’ organization, processcontinuity, price uncertainty, quality uncertainty, bidirectional knowledgetransference and so on;(4) the core competence of the management consultingenterprise mainly consists of four parts such as the ability of knowledgemanagement, the ability to control the implementation of consulting item, theability of brand management and the ability of network administration supported byknowledge;(5) under the support of the inner-enterprise knowledge base, themanagement consulting enterprise abstracts customers’ knowledge, the knowledgeof the same trade and all kinds of advanced theories from the society. Those kindsof knowledge form the core competence through co-evolution, fusion andoperationalization and spiral circulation of the knowledge creation.The third part (chapters5and6) does some researches on the comprehensiveevaluation of the core competence of the management consulting enterprise and itscultivation, producing two conclusions:(1) according to the structural system andformation elements of the core competence of the management consultingenterprise, the comprehensive evaluation indicator system is set up. Besides, thecomprehensive evaluation model of the core competence in the managemententerprise, formed through analytic hierarchy process (AHP), gray statistics and fuzzy evaluation system, can better overcome the gray value of the information andthe fuzziness of an expert’s judgment. The evaluation results on the corecompetence of the three management consulting enterprises are in conformity withtheir operation;(2) the cultivation and improvement of the core competence in themanagement consulting enterprise should be focused on the forming elements ofthe core competence and the construction of the environment of knowledgecreation. As for the construction of the environment of the knowledge creation,organization environment, knowledge creation and incentive mechanism are thethree main factors.The fourth part (chapter7) refers to the conclusion and some problems forfurther study.The findings of the thesis have further expanded the theory of the corecompetence and provided the theoretical evidences for the management consultingenterprise in the cultivation and improvement of the core competence.