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Essay / The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge - 653
Indeed, not all external knowledge can be easily used and transformed into new artifacts. If external knowledge is easily accessible, transformable into new artifacts, and exposed to many stakeholders (such as customers and suppliers), then innovative entry can take place (Winter, 1984). On the contrary, if advanced integration capabilities are required (Cohen and Levinthal, 1989), the industry may be concentrated and made up of large, well-established firms. Third, the domain concerns the degree of knowledge accessibility (Malerba and Orsenigo, 2000), that is, the opportunities to acquire knowledge external to firms. Accessible knowledge can be internal or external to the sector. In both cases, greater accessibility to knowledge decreases industrial concentration. Another dimension indicates that knowledge can also be cumulative, that is, the extent to which the generation of new knowledge builds on current knowledge (Malerba, 2002b). It identifies three different sources of accumulation. The first source lies in learning processes and dynamic increasing returns at the technological level. The cognitive nature of learning processes and past knowledge constrain current research, but also generate new questions and new knowledge. The second source is related to organizational capabilities. These capabilities are company specific and can only be improved incrementally over time. They implicitly define what a company learns and what it can hope to achieve in the future. A third source is market reactions, such as “success breeds success” processes. Successful innovation generates profits that can be reinvested in R&D, thereby increasing the likelihood of innovating again. Indeed, although there has been a growing culture of evaluation in the middle of the article......oriented primarily towards control rather than learning, rewarding individuals who work for others rather than cultivating their natural curiosity and desire to learn. Successful organizations encourage employee innovation as a means of producing measurable improvements in quality, quantity, and profitability (Hale, 1996). In The Fifth Discipline, Senge (1990a) identifies five new "component technologies" that he said were gradually transforming into learning organizations: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision, and team learning. Subchapter, innovation and risk-taking are inseparable in a learning organization, which Spear (1993: 14) defines as “a place of seeking the truth and speaking out without fear of reprisal or judgment… a place where curiosity reigns over knowledge and where experience.