Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management, Second Edition

Mapping the Collaborative Learning Field

Press accounts continue to be full of stories of underperforming or discontinued JVs and other inter-firm collaborations. JVs and strategic alliances more generally, thus, continue to have rates of failure estimated to be up to sixty percent. We are unaware of the precise figures for other cooperative arrangements, though we would assert that those outsourcing, geographically dispersed project teams and offshoring arrangements that involve knowledge application and exchange from more than one participant (unlike a typical sourcing arrangement by WalMart) do likely suffer from frequent failure to exploit learning potential to optimize the rents or other competitive advantages for the system of collaboration (i.e. the member organizations). The most modern organizations in one way or another extend their boundaries to gain strategic advantages (Cooper and Rousseau, 1999). Since the strongest and most enduring advantages accrue from unique configurations of structure, culture, and knowledge within the organization, this suggests that issues surrounding knowledge transfer and learning comprise a core issue for most modern organizations whether or not explicitly stated as a strategic priority.

In the following sections we organize our inquiry using questions that arose from our readings and discussions. Why should inter-organizational collaborations be viewed as platforms for learning? What is inter-organizational learning; who learns (the levels ...