Inter-Organisationales Lernen und die Integration spezialisierten Wissens in Kooperationen - Eine empirische Untersuchung anhand von kooperativen Entwicklungsprojekten

This paper deals with the problem of inter-organizational learning and the integration of specialized knowledge in cooperations. It is based on an empirical investigation of cooperative software development projects. The central research question analyzed here asks what kind of “learning strategies” the specialists employed to integrate the dispersed expert knowledge. Like the organizational learning discourse, the debate about inter-organizational learning is also dominated by the “cross-learning” position which posits that in-depth mutual learning is a necessary precondition for the creation of new knowledge. However, the empirical results prove to contradict this assumption. As a matter of fact, the central principle of the development process applied by the experts was not the mutual exchange of knowledge, but to strive for the most efficient level of integration of already existing knowledge bases and to allow for the preservation of their respective specializations. In spite of some substantial knowledge transfer in the initial project phase, it was always carried out in a selective manner and induced by actual problems. The results show that knowledge can be integrated successfully by making use of the relatively simple and robust mechanisms of transactive organizational learning (Transactive Memory and Transactive Prototyping – Kieser/Koch forthcoming). A certain amount of common knowledge was indispensable; yet, a detailed analysis along three subcategories reveals that the significance of common knowledge was limited to a facilitator-role for Transactive Prototyping.