내부 및 외부 조직학습과 혁신성과의 관계

Recent studies in business management have demonstrated that the organizational learning and the innovation are pivotal in strengthening a company’s competitiveness. Accordingly, the success of a company depends on creating the internal knowledge or reinforcing the knowledge in possession with the external knowledge, consolidating various fields of expertise, and how well to apply them to the R&D. This study has empirically proven using the manufacturing SMEs whether there is an interactive effect between internal and external organizational learning and whether the organizational learning is in nonlinear (U-shaped) relationship with innovation performance. Following empirical findings are based on 2,612 firms responded to 2011 Survey on Technology of SMEs. The internal organizational learning’s moderating effect was hypothesized to be reverse U-shaped with the external organizational learning, but it was found to be insignificant. However, the internal and the external organizational learning respectively had a negative effect on the R&D sales and were statistically meaningful. Implications from the analysis are that the organizational learning has a nonlinear, not a simple positive relationship with the R&D sales performance. Also, the internal and the external organizational learning are independent of each other rather than being substitutional or complemental. Further research should be done to develop the indicators that measure the internal learning. Also, given that the internal and the external learning are about organization’s behaviors, the measuring indicators need to be more qualitative, not merely focusing on quantitative aspect.