Organizational learning for implementing product platforms: A case study of an automotive manufacturer

Abstract

Product platform development has become a norm in practice for manufacturing companies, enabling firms to develop and produce products more efficiently, shortening the time needed to develop new derivatives, and reducing unit procurement costs. However, the required organizational activities for product platform development with different architectural knowledge need further exploration. We conduct a case study of an automotive manufacturer in China to explore how firms engage in organizational learning processes when implementing product platforms with different architectural knowledge. This study illustrates four organizational learning approaches rooted in exploration and exploitation, yields four configurations between architectural knowledge and the required organizational learning approaches and reveals that each of these architecture knowledge-organizational learning configurations produces different organizational performance.