Interventionist Research into Value Creation Mechanisms

In exploring the notion of value creation at the interface of the disciplines of Intellectual Capital (IC), Knowledge Management (KM) and business models, this chapter discusses the organization of interventionist research activities in order to achieve robust results. We understand robustness in terms of plausibility, which in most research traditions is denoted as validity and reliability. A further important contribution is to provide insight into the structuring of intervention-based research in combination with non-interventionist type methods. Based on a decade of interventionist research relating to value creation with over 100 companies, we illustrate the importance of pre-conception and organization of data-structures and research objectives. We argue that interventionist research projects should adhere to a set number of stages and that the motivation for intervention should be linked to expected learning outcomes and how the contribution from the intervention leads to a value-added contribution.