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Drawing on the knowledge-based view, this study investigates how IT–business alignment influences business model design via organizational learning and examines the moderating role of data-driven culture in the relationship between IT–business alignment and business model design via organizational learning.

Using multi-respondent survey data collected from 597 Chinese firms, mediation and moderated mediation analyses were used to examine this study's hypotheses.

The mediation test results revealed organizational learning served as a mediator between IT–business alignment and two types of business model design (i.e. novelty- and efficiency-centered). In addition, data-driven culture strengthened the indirect effects of IT–business alignment on these two types of business model design via organizational learning.

This study extends current understandings of the relationship between IT–business alignment and business model design by revealing the mediating role of organizational learning and investigating its indirect effects under various degrees of data-driven culture. As such, it contributes to the literature on the business model and IT–business alignment and provides insights for managers seeking to achieve the expected business model design.

The Morgan Library at Colorado State University in Fort Collins suffered catastrophic flooding as the result of a historic rain storm and flood that swept through the town on July 28, 1997. This study examines this single library's organizational disaster response and identifies the phenomena that the library's employees cited as their motivation for innovation.

Purpose – This study provides an example of a library where a pre-disaster and post-disaster organizational environment was supportive of experimentation. This influenced the employees’ capacity and motivation to create a new tool meant to solve a temporary need. Their invention, a service now called RapidILL, advanced the Morgan Library organization beyond disaster recovery and has become an effective and popular consortium of libraries.

Design/methodology/approach – This is an instrumental case study. This design was chosen to examine the issues in organizational learning that the single case of Morgan Library presents. The researcher interviewed employees who survived the 1997 flood and who worked in the library after the disaster. The interview results and a book written by staff members are the most important data that form the basis for this qualitative research.

The interviews were transcribed, and key phrases and information from both the interviews and the published book were isolated into themes for coding. The coding allowed the use of NVivo 7, a text analysis software, to search in employees’ stories for “feeling” words and themes about change, innovation, motivation, and mental models.

Three research questions for the study sought to learn how employees described their lived experience, how the disaster altered their mental models of change, and what factors in the disaster response experience promoted learning and innovation.

Findings – This study investigates how the disruptive forces of disaster can influence and promote organizational learning and foster innovation. Analysis of the data demonstrates how the library employees’ feelings of trust before and following a workplace disaster shifted their mental models of change. They felt empowered to act and assert their own ideas; they did not simply react to change acting upon them.

Emotions motivate adaptive actions, facilitating change. The library employees’ lived experiences and feelings influenced what they learned, how quickly they learned it, and how that learning contributed to their innovations after the disaster. The library's supervisory and administrative leaders encouraged staff members to try out new ideas. This approach invigorated staff members’ feelings of trust and motivated them to contribute their efforts and ideas. Feeling free to experiment, they tapped their creativity and provided adaptations and innovations.

Practical implications – A disaster imposes immediate and often unanticipated change upon people and organizations. A disaster response urgently demands that employees do things differently; it also may require that employees do different things.

Successful organizations must become adept at creating and implementing changes to remain relevant and effective in the environments in which they operate. They need to ensure that employees generate and test as many ideas as possible in order to maximize the opportunity to uncover the best new thinking. This applies to libraries as well as to any other organizations.

If library leaders understand the conditions under which employees are most motivated to let go of fear and alter the mental models they use to interpret their work world, it should be possible and desirable to re-create those conditions and improve the ability of their organizations to tap into employees’ talent, spur innovation, and generate meaningful change.

Social implications – Trust and opportunities for learning can be central to employees’ ability to embrace change as a positive state in which their creativity flourishes and contributes to the success of the organization. When leaders support experimentation, employees utilize and value their affective connections as much as their professional knowledge. Work environments that promote experimentation and trust are ones in which employees at any rank feel secure enough to propose and experiment with innovative services, products, or workflows.

Originality/value – The first of its kind to examine library organizations, this study offers direct evidence to show that organizational learning and progress flourish through a combination of positive affective experiences and experimentation. The study shows how mental models, organizational learning, and innovation may help employees create significantly effective organizational advances while under duress.

An original formula is presented in Fig. 1.

This paper maps the organizational learning processes in a policy intervention program. A state department of social services designed an intervention for local agencies and implemented it with a university. A closer observation of patterns detected organizational learning in local agencies by the increase in the penetration rate-a ratio of federal to state funding. An organizational learning model is constructed to understand the organizational learning process in this particular instance. The model includes learning modes and the roles that the policy knowledge instigators had played in the process. Each mode and role is defined and the model is refined based on in-depth interviews with participants in the learning process.

Organizational learning is traditionally structured with conventional in-house learning models aiming to equip employees with practical skills for operational needs. In contrast, contemporary goals emphasize unstructured organizational learning provided with learning environments to facilitate employees’ formal and informal knowledge creation. Therefore, the conventional organizational learning models are facing tremendous challenges, and it is crucial to change the traditional modes of practice into a new approach of collective learning and knowledge transfer. As well, the emergence of innovative business environments and tacit knowledge-based society urges a new form of organizational learning model to cope with employees’ learning, knowledge transfer and even knowledge management. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this study, the authors’ team applied a typological review for systematically analyzing current organizational learning models aiming to modify and create a new collective model.

The new model covers the strengths of existing approaches from which the fundamental 3Ps (i.e. principles, purposes and processes of organizational learning) concept is derived from incorporating a development perspective of organizational trajectories and technological innovations.

The authors envisage that the new model can facilitate organizations to assess and adapt their organizational learning needs and orientations by applying this organic and dynamic model which emphasizes assessment in relation to the competitive environment, technological trends and organizational growth.

The topic of organizational learning is populated with many theories and models; many relate to the enduring organizational learning framework consisting of knowledge acquisition, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge use. However, most of the research either emphasizes structural knowledge acquisition and dissemination as a composite construct, or focuses solely on the structural aspect of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. The primary objective of this study is to develop and test a model of organizational learning that incorporates both structural and informal knowledge acquisition and dissemination and as separate processes. The predictors of these processes are also proposed

A model of organizational learning that incorporates both structural and informal knowledge acquisition and dissemination constructs, along with three predictors of these organizational learning constructs were developed and quantitatively tested.

An inference to the research questions and hypotheses suggests that informal knowledge acquisition and dissemination have significant paths to market knowledge use, whereas structural knowledge acquisition and dissemination have, at best, a weak association with market knowledge use. Although the results were based on exploratory analysis, they provide tentative quantitative evidence that informal knowledge processes are at least as important as structural knowledge processes in market‐based organizational learning.

While the hypothesized model did not satisfy the goodness‐of‐fit tests, data‐driven exploratory analysis helped to refine two separate structural and informal models for future testing. The statistical explanation provided and procedures used to remedy the non‐fit issues should help future researchers to deal with structural equation‐modeling issues when similar non‐fit problems arise.

In this study, the authors unpack the micro-level processes of knowledge accumulation (experiential learning) and knowledge application (problem solving) to examine how task allocation structures influence organizational learning. The authors draw on untapped potential of the classical garbage can model (GCM), and extend it to analyze how restrictions on project participation influence differentiation and integration of organizational members’ knowledge and consequently organizational efficiency in solving the diverse, changing problems from an uncertain task environment. To isolate the effects of problem or knowledge diversity and experiential learning, the authors designed three simulation experiments to identify the most efficient task allocation structure in conditions of (1) knowledge homogeneity, (2) knowledge heterogeneity, and (3) experiential learning. The authors find that free project participation is superior when the members’ knowledge and the problems they solve are homogenous. When problems and knowledge are heterogeneous, the design requirement is on matching specialists to problem types. Finally, the authors found that experiential learning creates a dynamic problem where the double duty of adapting the members’ specialization and matching the specialists to problem types is best solved by a hierarchic structure (if problems are challenging). Underlying the efficiency of the hierarchical structure is an adaptive role of specialized members in organizational learning and problem solving: their narrow but deep knowledge helps the organization to adapt the knowledge of its members while efficiently dealing with the problems at hand. This happens because highly specialized members reduce the necessary scope of knowledge and learning for other members during a certain period of time. And this makes it easier for the generalists and for the organization as a whole, to adapt to unforeseen shifts in knowledge demand because they need to learn less. From this nuanced perspective, differentiation and integration may have a complementary, rather than contradictory, relation under environmental uncertainty and problem diversity.

This study aims to understand how practitioners use their insights in software development models to share experiences within and between organizations.

This is a qualitative study of practitioners in software development projects, in large-, medium- or small-size businesses. It analyzes interview material in three-step iterations to understand reflexive practice when using software development models.

The study shows how work processes are based on team members’ experiences and common views. This study highlights the challenges of organizational learning in system development projects. Current practice is unreflective, habitual and lacks systematic ways to address recurring problems and share information within and between organizations. Learning is episodic and sporadic. Knowledge from previous experience is individual not organizational.

Software development teams and organizations tend to learn about, and adopt, software development models episodically. This research expands understanding of how organizational learning takes place within and between organizations with practitioners who participate in teams. Learnings show the potential for further research to determine how new curriculums might be formed for teaching software development model improvements.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and validate a measurement scale to capture organizational learning capabilities (OLC) and examine how OLC affects innovation. There are several models in the literature that have been generated by statistical data from manufacturing firms. This paper presents a structural equation model in order to measure OLC in Iranian ceramic tile manufacturers. The proposed model has five dimensions – i.e. managerial commitment and empowerment, experimentation, risk taking, interaction with the external environment and openness and knowledge transfer and integration – and is evaluated by 23 items.

Data were collected from 18 Iranian ceramic tile manufacturers. The survey was sent to employees of the business section of each factory and a total of 173 valid questionnaires were obtained and used to test the research model, employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), a particular analysis of structural equation modeling methods.

In the validation process, both the principal components and the confirmatory factor analyses clearly corroborate the existence of the five dimensions mentioned in the theoretical work. Likewise, the scale provides information that could be used by those managers wishing to improve learning capability in their firms. In addition, the results show that the OLC has a positive impact on innovation.

This research suggests that that organizational environments that facilitate learning are more innovative. In addition, the OLC literature shows that OLC has a significant impact on the effectiveness and performance of the organization. Therefore, it is essential to find a valid measurement that can evaluate OLC in an organization. The five‐factor model introduced in this paper is a practical way to measure OLC. As a result, managers can determine which organizational learning issues are strong and which are weak; this is a hint for improvement.

This paper aims to establish an organizational learning system model based on both western and Chinese management thoughts.

The approach is a conceptual model which is based on research within the field.

The model consists of nine interrelated organizational learning sub‐systems including “discovering”, “innovating”, “selecting”, “executing”, “transferring”, “reflecting”, “acquiring knowledge from environment”, “contributing knowledge to environment”, and “building organizational memory” ones. The evidences in some famous Chinese traditional cultural classics (including Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius, Book of Change, Tao‐Te‐Ching, The Art of War and Chuan‐Xi‐Lu) that support the rationale of the model are described and analyzed.

Several propositions are developed and it is hoped that the model is applicable in both eastern and western business environments.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine organisational learning (OL) and individual managerial learning and provide a comparative evaluation of the ability of each to generate organisational benefits.

A theoretical model of organisational learning is developed which was then longitudinally tested in four organisations using causal cognitive mapping methods.

The results demonstrate that organisational learning can increase shared managerial understandings that may lead to organisational benefits derived from higher degrees of unified action. However, the study also revealed potentially dysfunctional aspects of organisational learning such as cohesive managerial mental models inhibiting learning and organisational learning can be slower than individual learning.

The research methodology and analysis is innovative and unique in this context. The author recognises the need for further research.

There is benefit for managers in promoting organisational learning; however, care must be taken to recognise when this learning is dysfunctional.

Whilst there have been strong theoretical assertions that OL is crucial for organisational survival and success, this is one of the few longitudinal empirical studies to support these claims. Another contribution is the generation of empirical evidence derived from cognitive methods which have rarely been used in the organisational learning context.