Understanding Organizational Innovation

In the last blog we defined the terms - Innovation and Cognition. In today's blog we begin looking at organizational innovation in the context of Knowledge Creation.

Innovation is a learning process by which new knowledge is created to solve the new problems that are defined. The core concept of study in all theories of Organizational Learning and knowledge creation is that of how organizations translate individual insights and knowledge into collective knowledge and organizational capability.

Such collective knowledge could be the accumulated knowledge of the organization stored in its rules, procedures, routines and shared norms which guide the problem solving activities and patterns of interaction among its members. It resembles the "collective mind" or "memory" of the organization, it could also be the hard data that is "static" or could be "flowing" in the interactions. It exists between the individuals of the organization, rather than within them. 

In some cases it could be more than the sum of the individual's knowledge and in others it could be less than the sum, it’s a matter of how the mechanisms to translate the individual knowledge to collective knowledge are designed. Both Individuals and Organizations are learning entity and it is important to understand that any learning takes place in a social context and this is what makes every learning outcome different.