Why do some organizations learn at faster rates than others? Why do organizations "forget"? Could productivity gains acquired in one part of an organization be transferred to another? Learning curves have been documented in many organizations, in both the manufacturing and service sectors. The classic learning curve model implies that organizational learning is cumulative and persists through time. However, recent work suggests that firms also demonstrate depreciation of knowledge, or "forgetting". Such understanding becomes more exciting as one looks at the link between learning and productivity. Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge describes and integrates the results of research on factors explaining organizational learning curves and the persistence and transfer of productivity gains acquired through experience. Chapter One provides an overview of research on organizational learning curves. Chapter Two introduces the concept of organizational "forgetting" or knowledge depreciation. Chapter Three discusses the concept of organizational memory. Chapter Four argues that analyzing small groups provides understanding at a micro level of the social processes through which organizations create and combine knowledge. Chapter Five describes results on knowledge transfer. Chapter Six discusses various tensions and trade-offs in the organizational learning process.

This book presents a solid, research-based conceptual framework that demystifies organizational learning and bridges the gap between theory and practice. Using an integrative approach, authors Raanan Lipshitz, Victor Friedman and Micha Popper provide practitioners and researchers with tools for understanding organizational learning under real-world conditions.

Organizational Learning in Asia: Issues and Challenges addresses important and pressing questions on organizational learning in Asia in both domestic and foreign firms—those that have been forgotten in the mainstream literature or that remain unasked and unanswered. Three sets of questions are especially salient. First, how can firms operating in, or from, Asia detect, respect, recognize, and honor different cultural stances on suggestion-giving, knowledge sharing, and standardization while also challenging accepted wisdom, avoiding risks and mistakes, and voicing disagreement? Second, how can such firms facilitate local experimentation and innovation by providing a common knowledge platform in a non-totalitarian manner? Finally, how can such forums promote 'reverse' knowledge transfer from subsidiary to headquarters and across subsidiaries in different nations by avoiding ethnocentricity, cultivating local talent, and building a group of 'communities of practice' across cultural and status boundaries? - Addresses important and pressing questions about organizational learning in Asia for both domestic and foreign firms - Explores how such firms can facilitate local experimentation and innovation - Promotes 'reverse' knowledge transfer from subsidiary, to headquarters, and across subsidiaries in different nations

This volume presents the view that what matters most are learning processes in organizations and ways of enhancing the sophistication and power of these processes. Each contributor, therefore, explicitly addresses the meaning(s) of organizational learning which they have adopted themselves.

Bridging an identified gap between research and practice in the domain of risk and organizational learning with respect to human/organizational factors and organizational behaviour, this book highlights the common and recurring threads in contributory factors to accident causation. Based on an extensive research project, it investigates how shipping companies as organizations learn from, filter and give credence/acceptability to differing risk perceptions and how this influences the work culture with special regard to group/team dynamics and individual motivation. The work is presented in the context of the literature regarding conceptual links between risk and the theoretical and operational themes of organizational learning, and in light of interviewees' comments. The themes include processes and structures of knowledge acquisition, information interpretation and distribution, organizational memory and change/adaptation and also levels of learning. The book concludes by discussing some practical implications of the research carried out in various maritime contexts and gives recommendations for the industry and other stakeholders.

The central assumption that guides this book is that research and practice about learning at the workplace has recently lost its critical edge. This book explores what has happened to workplace learning and organizational learning and studies what has replaced it. In addition, the book discusses to what extend there are reasons to revitalize it. Today, themes such as ‘innovation’, ‘co-creation’ and ‘knowledge sharing’ seem to have become preferred and referred to as theoretical fields as well as fields of practice. In several chapters of this book it is argued that the critical power of learning could be regained by starting a new discussion of how these new fields of practice can be substantiated by topics such as learning arrangements, learning mechanisms, and learning strategies. Hence, the aim of this book is to both advance and recapture our knowledge of learning in today’s increasingly complex world of work and organizing. The contributions in this work do so by revisiting classic research on workplace and organizational learning and discussing how insights from this body of literature evokes new meaning. It sets the stage for new agendas and rethinks current practices that are entangled in activities such as innovation, co-creation, knowledge sharing or other currently widespread fields of practice.

This book discusses the successes and challenges of leveraging organizational learning in effective strategy development and execution. The authors introduce a framework that helps organizations develop core capabilities to enable them to shift direction rapidly and proactively shape future environments. They also offer a wide selection of cases to illustrate this framework. While some cases highlight fundamental strategic change over time, others are snapshots of mechanisms gradually put in place to jointly optimize learning and performance. There is no one best or right way to leverage strategic organizational learning; different practices may lead to the same outcome and similar practices may lead to different outcomes. The system dynamics underlying such learning — not the simple adoption of one or other practice — are key to success in institutionalizing a performance-based learning approach.

This book investigates organizational learning from a variety of information processing perspectives. Continuous change and complexity in regulatory, social and economic environments are increasingly forcing organizations and their employees to acquire the necessary job-specific knowledge at the right time and in the right format. Though many regulatory documents are now available in digital form, their complexity and diversity make identifying the relevant elements for a particular context a challenging task. In such scenarios, business processes tend to be important sources of knowledge, containing rich but in many cases embedded, hidden knowledge. This book discusses the possible connection between business process models and corporate knowledge assets; knowledge extraction approaches based on organizational processes; developing and maintaining corporate knowledge bases; and semantic business process management and its relation to organizational learning approaches. The individual chapters reveal the different elements of a knowledge management solution designed to extract, organize and preserve the knowledge embedded in business processes so as to: enrich organizational knowledge bases in a systematic and controlled way, support employees in acquiring job role-specific knowledge, promote organizational learning, and steer human capital investment. All of these topics are analyzed on the basis of real-world cases from the domains of insurance, food safety, innovation, and funding.

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.

The application of emerging multimedia innovations can significantly benefit organizations across different sectors. These tools aid in increasing competitive advantage and optimizing knowledge management. Evaluating Media Richness in Organizational Learning is an essential reference source for the latest scholarly research on the application of computational tools for knowledge management frameworks and strategies in organizations. Featuring a broad range of coverage on topics and perspectives such as web semantics, product innovation, and knowledge sharing, this book is ideally designed for researchers, consultants, practitioners, professionals, and upper-level students seeking current information on ways to facilitate business innovation and achieve competitive advantage.