Research On The Effect Of Organizational Unlearning And Organizational Relearning On Innovative Capacity In Enterprises

Innovative capacity plays a very important role for survival and development of a company. Early in the beginning of the20th century, innovation and innovation capacity have given rise to the attention of the academics. Since then, a lot of research has been conducted in this area from different perspectives, and some research results have been obtained and accumulated. With the increasingly drastic turbulence and volatility of external environment, the critical issue that each enterprise must face is how to promote an enterprise’s Innovative capacity. In this context, it is necessary and feasible to do further research on the innovation and innovative capacity.In theory, strategic flexibility enables enterprises to quickly adapt to and deal with dramatic change of external environment, and to flexibly and reasonably configurate and integrate all internal and external resources, which is an important premise to improve the innovative capacity. And innovative capacity and strategic flexibility depend largely on the possession of knowledge (i.e. knowledge stock) in enterprise; therefore, the dynamic management of enterprises’knowledge enhances innovative capacity and strategic flexibility greatly. Moreover, organizational unlearning and organizational relearning are the important content of knowledge management; the former is a process of old knowledge deletion and the latter is a process of new knowledge acquisition. Both of them make enterprises’knowledge stock update continuously. Thus it can be seen that it have important theoretical and practical value to research strategic flexibility and innovative capacity under synergistic effect of organizational unlearning and organizational relearning.Therefore, based on the literatures summarization of relevant theories, a new conceptual model has been put forward in this paper to examine the relationships between organizational unlearning, organizational relearning, strategic flexibility (including resource flexibility and capacity flexibility) and innovative capacity (including incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity). And the relationships between these variables and relevant generating mechanism are analyzed under this framework; its main contents includes the following7parts:(1) the direct impact of organizational relearning on innovative capacity;(2) the direct impact of organizational unlearning on innovative capacity;(3) the direct impact of organizational relearning on strategic flexibility;(4) the direct impact of organizational unlearning on strategic flexibility;(5) the direct impact of strategic flexibility on innovative capacity;(6) the mediating impact of organizational unlearning on the relationships between organizational relearning and innovative capacity;(7) the mediating impact of organizational unlearning on the relationships between organizational relearning and strategic flexibility. Finally,16hypotheses are raised to explain those contents in detail.In research methods, this paper mainly adopts the method of questionnaire survey to obtain the data. And then structural equation modeling is applied to study the relationships between the relevant variables with the help of SPSS and LISREL. The empirical results show the samples collected fit the model well, and the fourteen of all the hypotheses is tested, while the other is not supported. For the tested hypotheses, we offer the implications to the Chinese enterprises. And for the untested hypotheses, we focus on the reasons and provide enlightenment for future research.This paper gets the following conclusion through theoretical and empirical research:(1) In the process of innovation, Organizational relearning can enhance the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity (see hypothesis la and hypothesis lb); and organizational unlearning can also promote the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity (see hypothesis2a and hypothesis2b).During the process of organizational relearning affecting the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity, organizational unlearning plays a moderating role (see hypothesis2c and hypothesis2d).Similarly, organizational relearning can give the promotion of resource flexibility and capacity flexibility (see hypothesis3a and hypothesis3b); and organizational unlearning can raise the resource flexibility and capacity flexibility as well (see hypothesis4a and hypothesis4b). During the process of organizational relearning affecting the resource flexibility and capacity flexibility, organizational unlearning plays a moderating role (see hypothesis4c and hypothesis4d). However, when the relationship between strategic flexibility and innovative capacity is discussed, the empirical results show that capacity flexibility make a contribution to the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity (see hypothesis5c and hypothesis5d), while resource flexibility’s contribution to the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity is not significant (see hypothesis5a and hypothesis5b). Therefore, Chinese enterprises should create favorable conditions for organizational unlearning and organizational relearning to improve the strategic flexibility, and finally enhance innovative capacity from the three factors mentioned above.(2) According to the empirical results, resource flexibility’s contribution to the incremental innovation capacity and radical innovation capacity is not significant (see hypothesis5a and hypothesis5b). There are several reasons that account for this result, but the following three may be the main ones. First, the natures of resource vary with the change of environment. The advantage of resources will be gradually reduced, so that a great change has taken place on the effect of resource on the innovative capacity. Second, knowledge stock is a possible basis for innovation of enterprises and the talent is a carrier of knowledge. Especially, it also virtually weakens the influence of resources to the enterprises’ innovative capacity because of a new and effective way in cultivating talents. In addition, with the importance of capacity flexibility getting clearer in enterprise’s development, Chinese enterprises begin to pay more attention to their self-development in capacity, and capacity flexibility play a more significant role in the activities of innovation. Therefore, the paper support the opinion that Chinese enterprises’ innovation can not rely too much on the resources controlled by enterprises; and how to make good use of resources should be of concern. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises should pay more attention to the potential value of knowledge and knowledge management in innovation, establish and perfect their talents training and knowledge management system.The innovations in this paper are embodied in the aspects as follows:(1) Based on previous studies, this paper makes a systematic literature review and forefront analysis on the organizational relearning and unlearning, takes into account the relationships on organizational relearning, organizational unlearning, strategic flexibility and innovative capacity, and puts forward a new analysis framework from knowledge management.(2) This paper reveals the process of knowledge management from a new perspective of organizational relearning and unlearning. However, available researches rarely pay attention to the dynamic knowledge management and relevant implementation process and mechanism. Therefore, this paper provides a new way to make further researches on dynamic knowledge management, which make contribution to relevant theories development.(3) This paper shows that how to increase the strategic flexibility of enterprises through synergy between organizational relearning and organizational unlearning. Nevertheless, most of the existing research focuses on the constitution of strategic flexibility or uses organizational reform theory to analyze strategic flexibility. As a result, scholars ignore that strategic flexibility is a kind organization of enterprises’ knowledge, forming from long-term production and operation activities. Therefore, this research provides a new perspective to analyze the strategic flexibility profoundly.(4) At present, the scholars pay more attention to the effect of organizational learning on innovative capacity in enterprises. However, those scholars ignore that knowledge is time sensitive. For this reason, this paper brings organizational unlearning into previous research framework, using two-way framework (including organizational relearning and unlearning) instead of previous one-way framework (including organizational learning). And based on this two-way framework, I discuss the influence of organizational relearning (the process of new knowledge obtainment and utilization) and organizational unlearning (the process of useless knowledge deletion) on enterprises’innovative capacity in this paper. Therefore, this research can be a supplement to previous research framework of innovative capacity.