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Introduction
When academics from higher education institutions (HEIs) are commissioned to provide consultancy and management development for external organisations in the public sector, a number of skills are deployed which differ, perhaps greatly, from those associated with classroom teaching. The contract may need to be won competitively before a demanding audience. The academics' delivery performance may be "auditioned". There is likely to be instant evaluation, with little room to compensate for getting it wrong. These are practical and challenging issues relating to skills and experience. The present paper considers the challenges of knowledge, learning and co-production within the management development relationship. These include issues of both theory and practice. Public sector practitioners are highly skilled people, likely to possess practical knowledge and experience which exceeds that of the HE staff commissioned to work for them. Therefore academics may not be offering an immediate input to practice. Yet there is little scope for providing a contribution to theory as this is quite probably the last thing on the minds of commissioning organisations. Practitioners seek something of utility, justifying the considerable costs of HEI input. This paper considers exactly what is being offered by HEIs that organisations cannot provide for themselves. Do organisations know what they are buying, and do HEI providers know what they are selling? To explore these questions, interviews were conducted (see Note on Methodology) with managers in two public sector organisations and with management educators in two HEIs to gain a closer understanding of these underlying processes.
The organisation-higher education relationship
There are many ways of conceiving of the relationship between HE and the business community (e.g. [21] Muff, 2012) and of the relationship between theory and practice in management research (e.g. [22] Reed, 2009). The precise relationship between external organisation and HEI provider can vary widely and some forms of provision - for instance management courses delivered in HE that are required to follow an externally determined curriculum for a professional awarding body - are properly considered part of education and training rather than management development. However, we would suggest that all management development relationships fall within the following continuum.
We are interested in the mid-point, i.e. co-production (or co-creation). Within this, a number of significant questions arise: is co-production wanted by...