Profiting from Knowledge Management: The Impact of Time and Experience
Information Systems Research
Ownership, experience and defects: a fine-grained study of authorship
Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering
Paradoxes of professionalism and error in complex systems
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Information Systems Research
Information Systems Research
Organizational Learning: From Experience to Knowledge
Organization Science
The Effects of Focus on Performance: Evidence from California Hospitals
Management Science
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Optimal employee retention when inferring unknown learning curves
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Selection at the Gate: Difficult Cases, Spillovers, and Organizational Learning
Organization Science
Single machine scheduling with autonomous learning and induced learning
Computers and Industrial Engineering
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This paper examines learning curves in the health care setting to determine whether organizations achieve performance improvements from cumulative experience at different rates. Although extensive research has shown that cumulative experience leads to performance improvement across numerous contexts, the question of how much of this improvement is due to mere experience and how much is due to collective learning processes has received little attention. We argue that organizational learning processes may allow some organizations to benefit more than others from equivalent levels of experience. We thus propose that learning curves can vary across organizations engaged in the same "learning task," due to organizational learning effects. To investigate this proposition, we investigate cardiac surgery departments implementing a new technology for minimally invasive cardiac surgery. Data on operative procedure times from a sample of 660 patients who underwent the new operation at 16 different institutions are analyzed. The results confirm that cumulative experience is a significant predictor of learning, and further reveal that the slope of the learning curve varies significantly across organizations. Theoretical and practical implications of the work are discussed.