Learning at the boundary of the firm : learning-by-interaction between a manufacturer and its users

My dissertation centers on the very nature of the interaction and the learning that happens between users and manufacturers, and explores various micro-level mechanisms, which I call, "learning-by-interaction." The core concept, learning-by-interaction at the boundary of a firm, challenges the conventional perspectives - unidirectional and iterative - that failed to recognize the interactive learning process that happens between a manufacturer and its users. At the center of collaborative development of new products lies the issue of a language problem. When manufacturer and its users are engaged in the new product development process, they will naturally speak different languages. Investigation into the communication between seemingly disparate groups - a manufacturer and its users - reveals that the language boundary can be mitigated by local coordination based on the technical interdependencies between user requirement and technological implementation. Chapter 2 initiates this discussion by laying the foundation of the phenomenon. By reviewing the extant literature on firm boundaries, I extract relevant mechanisms in which the user-manufacturer boundary can be better designed. The language-oriented perspective is then presented as the main perspective of this dissertation. By conducting an exploratory study at a financial services firm, Fidelity Investment, I identify a long tail of the users' language diversity. This indicates that a substantial amount of commonality and a substantial amount of diversity coexist among the users.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Bae, Sung Joo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eric von Hippel.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/58170

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/58170