The formalization of organizational capabilities and learning: results and challenges

This work presents a critical overview of the achievements and challenges ahead facing explicit formalizations of organizational capabilities and learning. We first present the main characteristics both of NK models and of the approach based on classifier systems, focusing on their early applications to organization studies. We then discuss how the use of these models has contributed, in recent years, to the formal analysis of the development and change of firm’s dynamic capabilities by improving our understanding of processes of organizational learning, the representation of the cognitive and problem-solving capabilities of the organization, the link between capabilities and governance issues, in particular in presence of asymmetric power distributions.