Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 54

We turn now to the term ‘innovation capacity’. The capacity of companies in the current context becomes crucial for their performance. It defines a constant need to develop the qualifications of individuals and the organizational or technological skills of companies. The constitution of knowledge includes practical skills through learning by imitation, as well as intellectual capacities acquired in educational and training institutions. It also includes knowledge management through organizational learning, as well as R&D. In other words, innovation capacities include the realization of learning processes through practice (learning by doing), through use (learning by using) or through interacting (learning by interacting), as well as individual learning processes (education and training), controlled directly by individuals. These are inherent prerequisites for innovation processes, even though they do not directly concern them. Direct learning processes are mainly aimed at universities, research centers and R&D laboratories and concern formal organizations, while indirect learning processes are more concerned with internal company learning processes. The similarity between the two processes lies in their social and interactive nature. Finally, learning processes combine four types of knowledge (Lundvall and Johnson 1994): know-what or informational knowledge, know-why or the understanding of social and natural phenomena (scientific knowledge), know-who or the social ability to cooperate and communicate, and finally, know-how or the ability to do something on a practical level (experience). All of these processes, far from being exhaustive, are not only related to the amount of energy spent by actors to solve problems, but also to the expertise that actors have in mastering new knowledge. They consist of efforts to use local knowledge through the capacity to (be able to) internalize foreign knowledge. We speak of domestication of knowledge, rehabilitation and local reappropriation. For this, while knowledge utilization is achieved through capacity building, it also depends on learning opportunities. These capacities, based on constantly evolving demand, develop very rapidly within contexts of learning opportunities: i.e. access to universities, research centers and institutions, and also to national education systems or research projects (Gregersen and Johnson 1997).

The set of capacities shows the great diversity of learning processes that a company can institute, in line with its direct and indirect environment. This diversity is more broadly understood as a “learning culture” (Johnson et al. 2003). The latter refers to the daily promotion of learning in all segments of the economy (R&D, production, human resources, institutions, politics): from individual learning to organizational learning, tacit and explicit, formal and informal, in low and medium technology, from the exact sciences to the humanities. It requires the adaptation of knowledge to local conditions and the improvement of these conditions in the economy as a whole. It is through lack of a “learning culture” that innovation capacities are limited and the institutional framework is not well equipped to promote the necessary learning. In other words, valuing learning in all its forms is key to understanding how firms learn.