Cross-Organizational Learning Approach in the Sustainable Use of Fly Ash for Geopolymer in the Philippine Construction Industry

Abstract

The construction industry faces a challenging situation in attaining sustainable development goals. The carbon footprint of the production and use of construction materials such as the use of ordinary Portland cement in concrete products is still on the rise despite of many alternatives and technologies. In this paper, the local cross-organizational learning approach (COLA) and a systematic review of academic and professional literatures were applied in analyzing the use of fly ash as a geopolymer in the Philippine construction industry. Three primary stakeholders were considered: academe, professional organizations, and industry. Documents from each stakeholder were collected, with keywords including sustainability, fly ash, and geopolymer. These documents included published materials, newsletters, department orders, codes, and policies. Text analytics throughout the documents were applied using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, which uses a hierarchal Bayesian-modelling process that groups set of items into topics to determine the maturity level of the organizational learning. An adoption framework is proposed aligning COLA with the awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA) funnel model. Results show that the organizational maturity until optimization of academe is sufficient towards interest and desire, while industry is highly encouraged to increase organizational maturity from managed to optimization towards desire and action. Factors such as organizational intelligence (OI) and organizational stupidity (OS) are to be considered in balancing critical thinking across organizations. Further studies are recommended by considering the use of COLA with ASEAN organizations in the development of sustainable construction materials.