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Examines problems that have arisen over the past four years in the application of business process re‐engineering (BPR) to “real world” companies. Major problem areas include lack of sufficient preparation, problems associated with implementation, organizational weaknesses, weaknesses inherent in BPR and problems that develop in the aftermath of BPR. Then provides guidelines to minimize the emergence of these problems and improve the potential for success of future re‐engineering efforts.

Corporate research and development should be an integral part of a company's strategy to innovate and to maintain technical and scientific support for its business activities. In most companies, corporate R&D is under pressure to develop longer range plans of higher quality and usefulness for their programs and projects. Although our study did not find much opposition to the concept of long‐range planning of corporate R&D, we did find subtle resistance to the concept of planning for “basic” or “exploratory” research (a small percentage of the total R&D budget).

The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of people and organizations who transact in knowledge.

Based on structural interviews with 37 managers in three large manufacturing companies a model is proposed which describes the processing of knowledge in organizations.

Four stages are identified: generation, transfer, implementation, and absorption. Similarly, three types of transactors in knowledge are also identified: generators, transformers, and users. The findings from the interviews are the different motives that animate the different transactors in knowledge, and the distinct behavioral roles that these transactors assume in their organizations.

This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of people and organizations in their transaction in knowledge.