Since the turn of the century, interest in diverse forms of inter-organizational relationships has proliferated in practice as well as in the most prestigious outlets for management studies. As the lowering of trade and investment barriers coincided with widespread access to ever cheaper and more sophisticated means of control, coordination, and communication (Friedman, 2006), many businesses and entrepreneurs have taken advantage of these changes to create more far-flung and complex supply chains, geographically dispersed teams, and network firms. Recent research has emphasized the importance of understanding the structural position of firms in inter-organizational networks (such as in the case with supply chains) and what sorts of structural arrangements encourage or impede knowledge transfer (Easterby-Smith, Lyles, and Tsang, 2008). Moreover, contemporary research that looks more closely at intraorganizational versus inter-organizational learning, frequently does so in order to link it explicitly to innovation and the creation and sustaining of firm capabilities (Hult, Ketchun, and Arrfelt, 2007; Easterby-Smith et. al., 2008).
This context creates a challenge for management scholars to redress the limits of theoretical and empirical understanding about structuring and the processes internal to an organization that foster taking both internally and externally generated knowledge and combining these to exploit current performance strengths or create new ones. The challenge is rendered more difficult by the tendency of research relevant to this larger question being dispersed across different scholarly communities. These boundaries have not been conducive to cross-fertilization and building more general theories of learning.
Our objective is to provide a new, more encompassing meta-framework to help map the inter-organizational collaborative learning and knowledge management field more rationally and systematically. Compared to Salk and Simonin’s (2003) earlier overview of the field, the literatures that deal with one or more aspects of collaborative learning have become both more numerous and more diverse. Our contention is that learning and knowledge-driven issues rooted in diverse organizational settings can be encapsulated under this single, unifying paradigm. Hence, we shall review and attempt to distill commonalities and key issues across literatures that rarely address one another, even if they might invoke certain shared foundations as in March (1991) and Cohen and Levinthal (1989). Now that our intentions are clear, henceforth, when referring to collaborative learning alliances, we mean organizational collaborations of all types, from equity joint ventures, to outsourcing, to cross-functional/cross organizational development teams.
Collaborative learning refers to joint action and sense making in a purposive relationship for which the identification, transfer, and experimentation with knowledge originating with another entity has the potential to enhance existing competence or create new competence (Lane, Salk, and Lyles, 2001; Easterby-Smith et. al., 2008; Holmqvist, 2004). The notion of a purposive relationship is important because goals lead to theories or expectations about the experience and knowledge residing in the partner that might or might not manifest in actual collaboration. Hence, the key is ‘purposive’ and this need not (and usually will not) involve learning as the central objective. All three of the activities—identification, transfer, and experimentation—might entail active intent and involvement by more than one entity (e.g. one organization motivated to teach and the other motivated to learn). However, the experimentation with identified and transferred knowledge might often occur in multiple entities without interdependence (e.g. each partner takes knowledge from an IJV and brings it in house to experiment and recombine). The entities may be groups or individuals as well as organizations. In the case of new geographically dispersed teams, increasingly used for projects such as product development (Cramdon and Hinds, 2005; O’Leary and Mortensen, 2010), members’ interdependencies translate into effective knowledge also leveraging learning via development of a transactive memory (Moreland and Myaskovsky 2000). This memory becomes a property of the team when individuals can differentiate, identify, and integrate in action the different domains of expertise of individuals and across sites (O’Leary and Mortensen, 2010). We shall further expand upon this definition and its implications in mapping and synthesizing our framework from recent scholarly works.