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This paper aims to explore the relationship between the concept of the learning organization and that of the co-creation of value.

The paper is conceptual in nature and draws on data from a case study of a small highly innovative Australian company.

The authors show that, from a value co-creation perspective, the learning organization can be viewed as an open, collaborative, social/economic actor engaged in social/economic activities with other interdependent actors (organizations or stakeholders) in a network or ecosystem of actors to serve its mission/purpose and the well-being of the ecosystem.

As a conceptual paper, the authors rely primarily on previous research as the basis for the argument. The implications of the findings are that, as value co-creation practices are founded upon the generation and leveraging of specific intangible capital resources, more research located in alternative research paradigms is required.

There are important implications for organizational leadership in that the practices that underpin value co-creation require the leadership to be able to work constructively with multiple forms of systemic and agentic power.

In increasingly turbulent and hyper-competitive global operational contexts, sustainable value creation is becoming recognized as a collective achievement within a broad eco-system of collaborators. This has implications for the relational capabilities of all collaborators.

The authors introduce a new perspective on the role of power management in the facilitation of the co-creation of value. Arguing that value creation is becoming recognized as a “collective achievement”, they focus on the collaborative practices that enable such an achievement.

This paper aims to report on case-study research that explores the role of leadership practices, in particular, in enhancing the capacity of an enterprise to learn to create new value from a diverse range of sources. The capacity to sustain value creation over time, and across turbulent environments, increasingly differentiates enterprise performance. Under the umbrella term of “dynamic capabilities”, a range of practices have been identified in the literature as contributing to an enterprise’s ability to learn to perform this task successfully.

The paper is based on case studies of three enterprises whose founders have sustained the creation of new value for customers over decades. Through a series of unstructured interviews with each founder, the tacit knowledge gained from years of learning how to create, and re-create, value, is made explicit through hermeneutic analysis of the interview transcripts.

The data identify four key areas of leadership practice that underpin the capacity to learn to continuously create new value over significant periods of time. The most important of these are the social practices that generate and leverage the intangible capital resources (in particular, the resource of trust) that underpin the collaborative learning on which value creation processes depend.

As interpretive research, the knowledge accessed through this research is context-dependent and cannot be readily generalised. The validity of the knowledge is high, however, as the epistemological and ontological assumptions of the interpretive research paradigm recognise the political nature of organisations and, thus, of learning and value creation. As such, the knowledge generated by the case analyses offers a rich alternative perspective on the issue under research.

The cases illuminate the nature of learning that supports continuous value creation in enterprises. Such learning is framed by several leadership practices that enable the self-reflexivity that underpins the continuous conversion of action-generated tacit knowledge into more strategically useful explicit knowledge. At the core of these leadership practices is stakeholder collaboration and intellectual humility.

The results show that learning to create sustainable value over time and diverse contexts, has a socio-political dimension in that it depends heavily on generating and leveraging the intangible resources (such as trust, commitment, ideas) that reside within social relationships.

The research is located within the interpretive research paradigm and thus offers an alternative view to that of conventional positivist research. Furthermore, the results indicate that learning is a strategic priority in rapidly changing environments and, thus, is a key leadership responsibility. Furthermore, the results show that value creation is a collaborative stakeholder achievement.

Strong emphasis on learning can help organizations more closely engage with customers to co-create value for them. Collaboration is vital and leadership plays an important role in establishing the conditions needed for a collective approach to innovation across all levels of the firm.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Strong emphasis on learning can help organizations more closely engage with customers to co-create value for them. Collaboration is vital and leadership plays an important role in establishing the conditions needed for a collective approach to innovation across all levels of the firm.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

WE offer our readers again our best wishes for the joy that appropriately belongs to Christmas. The happy festival comes at the close of one of the most fruitful and useful years in library history: a year which has seen wide developments—not, indeed, in the establishment of new libraries, though these have not been wanting (the last month of the year, for example, has seen Lord Elgin open the new library at Hendon), but in a drawing together of existing organizations, the creation of a really new Library Association, and a degree of co‐operation which thirty years ago would have seemed difficult.