Learning Across Product, Workgroup, and Geographic Boundaries

跨越产品、工作组和地理边界的学习组织学习对公司和国家的业绩和长期成功至关重要。能够从他们的经验中学习并将他们获得的知识转移到整个机构的组织比那些不太擅长组织学习的组织更成功。然而，组织的学习能力差异很大，一些组织表现出显著的进步，而其他组织则很少或根本没有学习。利用几年来从一家美国公司的高科技、离岸产品开发和制造设施收集的大量数据，该项目进行了三项研究，以了解1)产品、2)工作组和3)公司内部的地理边界。智力价值：第一项研究集中在高流动率的多产品生产环境中的组织学习。美国90%的产量来自多产品设施。然而，过去对组织学习的研究主要集中在单一产品或有微小变化的产品的生产现场。第一个研究考察了产品组合和员工离职对绩效的影响，离职对某些产品和流程是否比其他产品和流程更有害，以及具有特定技能和经验的个人的离职是否比其他个人的离职更有害。第二项研究考察了跨工作组的知识转移。第三项研究深入了解了将产品开发转移到更接近制造的地方是否有助于提高绩效，哪些产品开发活动可能需要共同定位，以及将更多产品开发活动转移到海外对绩效的影响。随着越来越多的制造业转移到海外，人们一直担心，研发等知识工作将随之而来。更广泛的影响：这三项研究提供了关于离岸环境中知识积累和转移的经验证据，从而为公司关于离岸外包以及美国工业和制造业政策的决策提供了依据。

Learning Across Product, Workgroup, and Geographic BoundariesOrganizational learning is critical to the performance and long-run success of firms and nations. Organi-zations that are able to learn from their experience and transfer the knowledge they acquire throughout their establishments are more successful than their counterparts that are less adept at organizational learning. Yet organizations vary significantly in their ability to learn with some organizations demonstrat-ing dramatic improvements and other organizations evidencing little or no learning. Leveraging extensive data collected over several years from a high technology, offshore product development and manufacturing facility of a U.S. firm, this project conducts three studies to shed light into learning across 1) product, 2) workgroup, and 3) geographic boundaries within the firm. Intellectual Merit: The first study focuses on organizational learning in a multi-product production envi-ronment with high turnover. Ninety percent of U.S. output comes from multi-product facilities. Yet past studies of organizational learning have focused primarily on production sites with a single product or a product with minor variations. This first study investigates how product mix and employee turnover affect performance, whether turnover is more harmful for certain products and processes than others, and whether turnover of individuals with certain skills and experiences is more harmful than turnover of other individuals. The second study examines knowledge transfer across workgroups. The third study sheds insights into whether moving product development closer to manufacturing helps performance, which product development activities may be important to co-locate, and the impact on performance of moving more product development activities offshore. As more manufacturing has moved overseas, there have been concerns that knowledge work, such as R&D, will follow. Broader Impact: These three studies provide empirical evidence about knowledge accumulation and transfer in an offshore environment, and thereby inform corporate decisions about offshoring as well as U.S. industrial and manufacturing policy.