Table 2

Illustrative Links: Strategic Issues and Implications of Chapters

Key Strategic Issue	Theme	Key Concepts	Implications for Strategy	Relevant Chapters
Industry structure	Repeated independent learning can lead to persistent performance differences.	Initially similar organizations can become locked into different learning mechanisms that lead to different results.	Learning per se does not produce competitive advantage. Internal learning mechanisms can reinforce or clash with one another.	Carley
Industry structure	When firms imitate the strategy of high performers in their neighborhood, patches of firms pursuing different strategies with different results can emerge	The emergence of cooperative patches depends on the distribution of initial strategies, the degree to which competition is localized. Recurrent interorganization learning can produce population level contour that constrain further organizational learning.	A firm that prefers to maintain a cooperative strategy might intentionally look for contexts with combine a starting group with a high proportion of firms following a cooperative strategy, larger scope of interaction and more sensitivity to diffuse competition in the process.	Ginsberg, Lomi & Larsen
Industry structure	Learning and changing performance standards; routines may rise and fall.	Organizational learning involves adaptive search on a performance landscape. Collective learning and action may change the performance standards which later shape future learning.	Firms can affect the outcome of competition among clusters of routines by influencing how a population collectively defines and influences which dimensions of merit matter.	Anderson; Lant & Phelps
Industry evolution	Firms often imitate others outside their local neighborhoods. Such learning may depress the performance of individual units, but may be important when it is necessary to import new routines.	Learning from firms in different settings often fails, because a particular routine only works in the context of a particular environment.	Superior selection of individual interorganizational learning targets could provide some firm level competitive advantage within an industry or strategic group. At the same time, inadequate permeability of neighborhood boundaries may reduce the viability of the whole industry/population.	Baum & Berta; Greve; Ginsberg, Lomi & Larsen; Wade & Porac; Lant & Phelps
Industry evolution	Firms may imitate other organizations based on how widespread they are, how similar they are, or on the outcome of a specific practice. Such learning may produce unexpected outcomes when many firms are employing the same learning mode at the same time.	No single mode produces the "best" results, but frequency- trait-based learning and outcome based learning may produce different learning rates. They may generate different patterns frequent or punctuated changes in distributions of routines and organizational forms.	Firms may profit from considering the broader pattern of interorganizational learning within which they function and the interorganizational learning modes of other organizations, to gain insight into how the collective pattern of imitation might transform the industry’s practices over time.	Mezias & Eisner; Baum & Berta
Industry attractiveness/ robustness	Individual organizational failures may enhance the profitability and survival chances of an industry as a whole	Failed experiments provide valuable lessons of experience for organizations that observe them	High failure rates could sometimes produce a potentially attractive industry	Miner et. al; Greve
Industry attractiveness/ robustness	Organizational learning can reduce the variance in organizations, lowering the survival chances of an industry as a whole. Exogeneous factors may enhance the presence of variance in potential practices.	Learning as reduction in variance versus learning as change in the mean. Semi-permeable boundaries permit subpopulations to escape the dangers of too little variation.	Organizations could profit from assuring semi-permeable boundaries around their subgroups, including strategic groups or others.	Lant & Phelps; Wade & Porac; Carley; Rura-Polley
Industry attractiveness/ robustness	The speed at which an industry learns influences its overall profitability	Population performance suffers in very speedy and very slow learning populations.	When learning rates are too high, individual and collective organizations may benefit from taking steps to retard the rate of learning; more and faster learning is not always better.	Baum & Berta; Mezias & Eisner