Assessing the impact of organizational learning capability on firm innovation

Abstract

The importance of the innovation to survive organizations in fast changing environment is generally accepted by all. Therefore, finding the effects of the organizational features on innovation is of paramount importance. The organizational literature shows that Organizational Learning Capabilities (OLC) plays a critical role in the development and promotions of companies and increases the potential of innovation. In this paper, we have developed a measurement scale to obtain OLC and examined how OLC affects the innovation. Several models have been proposed in literatures which are generated by statistical data from manufacturing firms. Our proposed model is a five dimensional model which includes managerial commitment and empower, experimentation, risk taking, openness and interaction with the external environment and knowledge transfer and integration and are evaluated by 23 items. Our scale is validated by the result of a data gathering from a sample of 18 Iranian ceramic tile manufactures. The survey were sent to the employees of the business session of each factory and a total of 173 valid questionnaires were obtained and used to test the research model by confirmatory factor analysis approach. As expected, the proposed scale provides useful information for managers to enhance organizational learning capability in their companies and OLC has a positive and significant effect on the firm innovation. Key words: Organizational learning capability (OLC), measurement, innovation.