Learning in Networks

Abstract

During the last decades, competence and knowledge have become increasingly focused as means for increasing the competitiveness of industrial companies. Organizational learning accordingly has become an important issue both in research and in managerial considerations. One important way to learn is through others. Companies have as one consequence devoted much interest into building special relationships with universities and other knowledge producers, such as lead users, to knit together special knowledge networks. However, the same interest has not been devoted to how the existing business relationships with customers or suppliers in general are taken care of from a learning perspective. In this article, we will present the results from a study of learning within business relationships formed around an ordinary construction project. One major conclusion is that the extent to which learning takes place seems to be highly related to the existence of connections between the relationships. The more each single relationship is part of a network the more the company in average seems to learn from it. The results can have managerial implications for both buying and selling companies.