Sharing for understanding and doing for learning: An Emerging Learning Business Network

Abstract

Changing competitive environments are forcing companies to innovate and to renew their business models in a more value-adding and customer-centric direction. Often, a prerequisite for this is that the companies are willing to combine their knowledge by openly co-operating and by creating long-term strategic networks with each other. We illustrate the importance of a business model in this co-operative arena and use it as a starting point for our discussion. Against this backdrop we are interested in how learning and knowledge sharing develop in an emerging business network. This leads us to develop a framework that combines learning with business models in order to bridge the gap between strategic vision with business processes and ICT-implementation issues in the business network setting.