Innovation And Innovation Case Study

1.1 Relevance
The study focuses on the phenomenon of IT industry which is credited with developing and sustaining distinct organizational cultures. The basic assumption here is that companies which are able to renew their knowledge stand a better chance of understanding the consequences of the changes in their environments and are better suited than competitors to respond faster and better to them. Compared to technology, which becomes more available and thereby reduces as a source of competitive advantage, human capital is much more difficult to imitate for competitors. There exists a strong relation between organizational learning and innovation and the innovation is important as a source of competitive advantage. One of the variables of
Every organization is to some degree a learning organization, differentiated by the extent to which they learn better, faster or more completely. This could be revealed through outcomes like creativity and innovation and is likely to be facilitated and supported by psychological climates and human resource systems that enhance and support learning and its application interest (Reid Bates and Samer Khasawneh,
Efficient operations emerge from ensuring that both tacit and explicit knowledge is shared and contribute to a collective understanding about how things work and how they could work. This is close to the definition of culture as the ‘way we do things around here’ (M. Lemon∗, P.S. Sahota, 2004). Organizations must develop ways of ensuring that the culture is conducive to knowledge sharing (Wharton, 1998). Wah (1999) puts forward the idea that the key issue is to ‘instill a corporate-wide culture that encourages knowledge sharing’. All this indicates the importance of the aspects of organizational culture and knowledge sharing. It is only through the process of sharing and assimilating information, often determined in large part by high levels of reciprocal trust that organizations can move from collections of individuals to a more collective culture (M. Lemon∗, P.S. Sahota, 2004). This culture may retain knowledge of the past even when the key organizational members leave the organization. Culture can therefore act as a knowledge repository. Drawing upon a range of literatures (e.g. knowledge management, organizational learning and innovation) culture is conceptualized as a ‘bundle’ of knowledge repositories with knowledge storing and information processing capabilities (M. Lemon∗, P.S. Sahota, 2004).
The purpose of this paper