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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the principles supporting organizational change management.

The paper develops a qualitative study from a single case which focuses on how the military (NATO) transformed their functionally integrated organizational form to gain additional flexibility and responsiveness.

The findings indicate that the transformation of military organizations has led to reshaping and aligning communication artifacts and organizational structures. In addition, it also entailed significant adaptations of the way knowledge is divided, allocated and coordinated among units, with a particular emphasis on standardization processes.

The implications of this study for scholars and practitioners are twofold. First, it shows that the conditions for success in organizational transformation reside in the consistency of the design strategy adopted by the organization. In particular, the findings provide evidence that the alignment of the structural and cognitive designs is critical but hard to achieve. Second, organizations and managers should devote time and effort to support the codification and standardization of both component and architectural knowledge. This contribution is limited by looking at a single case. On the premise that model generalization depends upon extensive empirical data, the current paper should be considered as a preliminary/exploratory research that aims at identifying the principles supporting organizational change management.

The originality of this paper is to look at military organizations to elaborate on a theoretical model of organization design which links together the structural and cognitive views and discuss its main implications for organizational change management.

This article aims to examine the nature and logics of organizational learning considered as a process by which organizations capitalize on the variety of experiences accumulated by their members.

Complementing the current literature on experiential learning, the authors build on a case study to investigate how organizations benefit from action learning and seek to identify the properties of the architecture supporting it. The case study focuses on how French Air Force fighter and airlift aircrews carry out debriefing sessions in their daily activities.

Within this framework, it can be observed that learning in debriefing sessions ultimately depends on the capacity of the learning agents to integrate individual and collective functions (namely, individual progression and collective performance).

Building on the foregoing, the paper elaborates on a conceptual model of the debriefing procedure made up of three components: a learning mode, a learning structure and a learning culture. It follows that the organization is likely to capitalize on individual experiences to improve knowledge and action if it is capable of providing its members with a flexible learning architecture enabling individuals to combine distinctive learning modes along with heterogeneous structures and cultural values.

This article aims to identify the capabilities supporting the development of collaborative innovation within knowledge‐intensive environments.

Re‐considering the history of the ARPANET project as a vivid example of collaborative innovation, the article presents qualitative research from a historical case.

Within this framework, the article shows that benefiting from collaboration in innovation entails that the innovative organisation is capable of achieving (at least) the following tasks: to leverage complementarities between internal and external sources of innovation (design capability); to codify, capitalise and disseminate knowledge outcomes (knowledge management capability); and to align product and organisations in a dynamic way (adaptive governance capability).

This contribution is limited by looking at a single case. On the premise that model generalization depends on extensive empirical data, the current article should be considered as preliminary/exploratory research that aims at identifying the capabilities supporting collaborative innovation within knowledge‐intensive environments.

The originality of this article is to look at a historical case to elaborate on a typology of collaborative innovation capabilities.