Organisational Learning Through Customer Interaction

Abstract

In the fierce competition of today’s business world an organization’s capacity to learn maybe its only competitive advantage. This research aims at increasing the understanding on how organizational learning from the customer happens in technology companies. In doing so it provides a synthesized definition of organizational learning and investigates processes of organizational learning within technology companies. A qualitative research method and in-depth interviews with different sized high technology companies, as applied here, enables in-depth study of the learning processes. Research contributes to the understanding of what type of knowledge firms acquire, how new knowledge is transferred and used in a learning firm’s routines and processes. Research findings show that SMEs and large size companies also, depending on their position in the software value chain, consider different knowledge types as most important and that they use different learning methods to acquire knowledge from their customers.