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: This study addresses the following questions: (1) can organizations learn how to manage infrequent and heterogeneous tasks ? (2) If they can, then what are the mechanisms that might explain learning under these circumstances ?, and (3) what are the limitations under which these mechanisms operate ? A model based on explicit knowledge codification and tacit experience accumulation is submitted and tested using data from a sample of 183 acquisitions in the US banking industry. Measures of post-acquisition integration strategies and of preacquisition resource characteristics are included in the model. We find that tacit knowledge accumulation significantly impacts performance when the experiences are highly homogeneous, and that knowledge codification improves acquisition performance in the context of high post-acquisition integration, i.e. when the organizational challenge is particularly complex. Also, the level of integration between the two firms involved in the acquisition positive...

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and Keith Pavitt helped improving along various drafts of the work. 1 2

Emerging organizational research has proposed increasingly nuanced links between capabilities and routines, which in turn play vital roles in organizational survival and prosperity. We draw on prior work to define capabilities as involving some consistency in potential outcomes in a particular domain. This contrasts with routines, which involve consistency in processes. We report results of an inductive study of patterns linking capabilities and routines in 60 young firms, drawing on 1,725 transcript pages. Many capabilities arose through deliberate design or combinations of existing routines. In rare cases organizations repeatedly improvised in a particular area and thereby sustained capabilities that did not rely on consistent routines in the relevant action domain. We also found several ways in which organizational capabilities sometimes harmed overall organizational performance, although in some cases the organizations learned from harmful capabilities. Routines arose from multiple sources. We highlight three forms of “making do ” with routines available from varied sources, all forms of bricolage. Finally, routines played several roles in organizational transformation in addition to their contribution to inertia. The paper suggests that we can theoretically distinguish capabilities from routines even as they are intertwined over time in organizations, and that improvisation and bricolage play roles in organizational entrepreneurial learning.

Introduction. That business firms, and economic organisations more in general, are systems of tightly coupled interdependent elements has been widely recognised by business historians (cf., for instance, Chandler (1962)) and organisation scientists (e.g. Weick (1979)). But a thorough investigation of the analytical implications for the economic theory of organisations of such interdependencies (or complementarities) has been undertaken only in very recent times (cf. Milgrom and Roberts (1990)). The recognition of the central role played by interdependencies does not only have profound implications for the standard profit maximising model of the firm, but also - and perhaps more interestingly - for the dynamics of learning and adaptation in firms. In fact, when applied to tightly coupled systems, selective pressure might be unable to select out harmful characteristics and drive eventually the system to optimality. Internal constraints are likely to bind the system to sub-optimal

This study examines time-based pacing of generational product innovation in the applications software industry. We argue that firms tend to develop temporal routines for introducing generational product innovations due to customer demands and internal operating procedures that value temporal consistency. The argument further suggests that organizational size moderates the time-pacing relationship. Employing event history analysis, we examined fortysix organizations competing in four segments of business productivity software from 1994 to 1998. The analysis suggests that software organizations, particularly larger organizations, employ temporal routines for generational product innovation. The results control for technological and market entrainment from the external environment, as well as several other common alternative explanations. KEY WORDS time-based pacing routines-based theory generational product innovation computer software Time-based pacing of innovation has drawn recent interest from both academics (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Souza, et al., 2004) and practitioners (Economist, 2003). Time-based pacing is especially important for generational product innovation. Generational product innovation represents a significant advance in the technical performance of an existing product (Lawless and Anderson, 1996). In turn, time-based pacing of innovation refers to releasing new generations of a product in a consistent pattern, such as releasing a new generation every eighteen months. Timing of generational product innovations is often central to firms' technological decision-making and has an important effect on business performance. As an example, the inability to successfully manage generational product innovation contributed to the failure of Lotus 1-2-3 in appli...

explorative case study of the transition to the

The existence of two alternative visions of the firm (the firm as a "processor of information" versus the firm a "processor of knowledge") 1 raises some fundamental theoretical questions. As Langlois and Foss (1996) have pointed out, we are confronted with the choice between, on the one side, a contractual approach based on transaction costs, where ‘firms and other institutions

The project addresses the nature of corporate organizations, their “competences” and “capabilities ” and their learning patterns. The analysis is undertaken at different levels of observations- ranging from firm-level studies of the patterns of technological and organizational change all the way to broad cross-national comparisons. Along with a wide set of empirical investigations, the projects explore the theoretical implications of a competence/capability based view of the firm. Finally, drawing from the observed relationships between competences and various indicators of organizational performances, the project is able to suggest a few "diagnostic " consequences for the European economy together with some policy implications. 2 1. BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT: AN INTRODUCTION. The analysis of the nature of corporate organizations, their “competences ” (or “capabilities”; see below for a finer distinction), their learning patterns and their embeddedness into broader national and sectoral institutions is possibly one of the