Organizational Networks: Innovation and Learning in Response of Organizational Challenges

The proposal of the session is to go through diverse innovative experiences of organizational networks in order to contribute to the existing theory.

Networks are defined as a selected, persistent and structured set of autonomous organizations that are linked to create products or services, based on implicit or explicit contracts . The networks are organized by groups of organizations that may belong to different sectors (public-social-private), creating alliances in order to provide certain services that would otherwise be very difficult to generate. They originate because each individual organization has a significant degree of resource dependency in relation to the other members and all together can carry out actions that they could not do individually.

Networks, when effective, contribute to building organizational capacity of their members. They provide social capital, governance and risk mitigation. Consequently, they are vital in fragile contexts, in which collaboration is essential for social change.

In this sense, networks have been studied as a space for organizational learning, not only considering the types of knowledge that are exchanged, but also in terms of the conditions that make the generation and dissemination of knowledge in organizations possible.

The session guiding questions are:

What are the processes and conditions through which knowledge is acquired through networks?

What are the learnings that allow strengthening organizational capacity through networks?

What is the contribution of networks to the generation of organizational learning and innovation?