Abstract
An organization’s ability to learn from past experience and observation of the environment around it affects the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. Organizational learning (OL) theory broadly defines this process in terms of seeking, interpreting, and using knowledge, with the process triggered by a reference gap and resulting in learning. The ability of the organization to leverage knowledge obtained through OL results in absorptive capacity (ACAP). ACAP specifically measures how the organization acquires, assimilates, transforms, and utilizes new information, resulting in both knowledge and commercial outputs and competitive advantages. While OL describes the construction of the knowledge base, ACAP describes how learning results in performance, flexibility, and innovation. ACAP is especially critical in rapidly changing, complex, or highly uncertain environments requiring the assimilation of a great deal of information in contexts which may not be programmable. Today’s digital environment, with the widespread availability of vast amounts of detailed, real-time information, renders the ability to screen, analyze, communicate, retrieve, store, and use new information into the key to increased performance, better organization–environment strategic fit, and lasting competitive advantage.
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- 1.
But see Fiol and Lyles (1985) for an argument against learning as “adaptation.”
- 2.
An interesting model using the OL framework to explain organizational strategic adjustments as a working out of competing goals in exploration versus exploitation may be found in Crossan et al. (1999).
- 3.
- 4.
An excellent example of ACAP in action is given by the founder of Dogfish Head Brewery in a discussion of entrepreneurship and the history of his organization (Calagione 2005).
- 5.
Note that this is R&D by one firm alone, and not R&D in partnership with another, complementary organization.
Abbreviations
- ACAP:
-
Absorptive capacity
- DLL:
-
Double-loop learning
- IS:
-
Information systems
- IT:
-
Information technology
- OL:
-
Organizational learning
- PACAP:
-
Potential absorptive capacity
- RACAP:
-
Realized absorptive capacity
- RBV:
-
Resource-based view of the firm
- SEM:
-
Structural equation modeling
- SLL:
-
Single-loop learning
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are due Vicky Arnold and Steve Sutton for input on a previous incarnation of this project and for their continued encouragement and patience with overly-complicated models and excessive enthusiasm.
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Zahller, K.A. (2012). Scientia potentia est: Organizational Learning, Absorptive Capacity and the Power of Knowledge. In: Dwivedi, Y., Wade, M., Schneberger, S. (eds) Information Systems Theory. Integrated Series in Information Systems, vol 29. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9707-4_6
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