This is - or should be - the bottom line of consulting. Clients hire consultants because there are skills they need, but lack. They could take the option of hiring a full-time employee to plug a particular gap, but consulting firms offer clients economies of knowledge. Consulting firms not only have systems and processes to help consultants learn rapidly, but they can also spread the cost of training over several clients. While consulting fees may seem high, they are still lower than if a client were to develop the skills they want in isolation. But the economics of consulting start to fall apart if the consulting firm leaves a client no better equipped than when it arrived. Unless consultants can improve management capability, they run the risk of creating a dependency culture, in which a client returns repeatedly to the same firm for the same work. Small wonder, then, that skills transfer is one of the most important success criteria from a client perspective. Of course, importance does not necessarily translate into ease. One of the reasons why skills transfer still appears among the attributes of good consulting is that it is hard to achieve in practice. Much work still needs to be done in order to analyse how know-how can be passed from consultant to client more effectively - it is a process that neither side fully understands at present and to which each side has been only half-heartedly committed in the past. Consultants have tended to see it as a nice-to-have: in an era when much consulting work is measured in terms of output delivered, skills transfer often appears to be a distraction. Clients, too, have paid lip-service to the idea and have been reluctant to make the additional investment almost certainly required. This is changing, as the cases in this book illustrate. Edengene's work with BT, for example, depended upon BT's staff becoming as familiar with the techniques for generating new ideas as Edengene's own consultants. Skills transfer is an important factor in almost every project, but it remains something much harder to achieve in practice than it appears on paper.