Content area
Full text
Abstract: We report about the design and implementation of an undergraduate course on organizational learning in an Austrian business school. Using problem-based learning, this course enables students to put theories on organizational learning into practice. In a live case study, a case partner from industry provides an unstructured and ill-defined problem which students try to solve. The design and implementation follow a recent call to complement rational-analytic with creative and design-oriented thinking in business schools and leadership education (Glen et al., 2014). The design thinking framework serves as a scaffold to apply theories from organizational learning to the problem. From a researcher's perspective, the course implementation reflects an action research cycle addressing how problem-based learning and design thinking can bring theory on organizational learning into practice. As the course evaluation shows, the proposed course design and implementation are well recognized by the students and are a viable way to teach organizational learning. With this paper, we contribute to the discourse on how design thinking can be applied in business schools and practically outline how it can serve as a scaffold to teach organizational learning.
Keywords: organizational learning, business school, problem-based learning, didactics, design thinking
1.Introduction
Business schools need to prepare students for increasingly complex and turbulent business environments. In respect to the knowledge-based theory of the firm (Drucker, 1993; Grant, 1996; Nonaka and Von Krogh, 2009; Sveiby, 2001), education should sensitize students that knowledge generation is the raison d'etre of any firm (Nonaka et al., 2000). Thus, knowledge and learning are of exceptional relevance for the firm's success. As a consequence, students need to develop a knowledge and learning perspective which allows them to cope with and shape knowledge-related processes. This is far from being trivial, as scholars and students are confronted with complex, ill-defined problems in organizations. How can we solve these wicked problems without being paralyzed by them (Coyne, 2005; Tsoukas, 2005)? Rational-analytic problem-solving approaches proved to be effective for solving well-defined and limited problems and led to important innovations in fields like finance, operations research, or linear programming (Glen et al., 2014). However, these approaches reach their limits when we apply them to ill-defined problems and ambiguous situations. Here, metaphors of management such as 'planning', 'controlling' or 'steering' turn out to...