Organizational capabilities learning

Du Pout s experience helps to define the path-dependency of long-term corporate financial success. Long-established learned organizational capabilities function as the most durable base for maintaining competitive advantage in existing product lines. At the same time, they provide the soundest base for commercializing new ones. ... 

Air Products and Chemicals, like Rohm and Haas, remained within the boundaries of its learned organizational capabilities. More than Rohm and Haas and Hercules, it became a successful international competitor. Most noteworthy was its ability to focus its small chemical business to become a leader in a much more focused specialty chemical niche. 

I begin with the evolution of Exxon s chemical product lines during the postwar years, for they clarify how existing organizational capabilities define the limits of the company s potential for commercializing new products and processes. After reviewing the Exxon chemical story, the paths of learn-... 

One of the primary incentives for inter-firm collaboration is organizational learning. Powell Koput (1996) succinctly indicate the motive for these linkages Research breakthroughs demand a range of intellectual and scientific skills that far exceed the capabilities of any one organization. As knowledge is brokered across institutional frames, opportunities for creativity and recombinant innovation are dramatically enabled ... 

Golden Circles inability to respond to the rapid changes that had engulfed the company was compounded by the absence of the enabling factors of organizational learning - the presence of a shared corporate vision plus a motivated and capable workforce. 

In the research presented here, two techniques for autonomous coordination have been implemented on a physical SHMRS (a) coordination with a hierarchically structured colleetive and (b) coordination with a horizontally structured collective. Unlike coordination achieved via the use of a hierarchical structure, the coordination performed within a horizontally structured collective requires all collective members to equally share the responsibility of the coordination. It is important to note that discussions pertaining to organizational structures in this chapter are limited only to the robot collective and do not refer to the overall SHMRS. Given superior capabilities for judgment, perception, and learning in humans compared to those in robots, an important assumption in this research is that the human supervisor is always ranked above the robots. Furthermore, it is necessary to note that current study does not envision the robots in the collective to adopt more than one collective structure during the duration of a deployment. 

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