In striving to learn about an information technology
innovation, organizations draw on knowledge resources available in
the community of diverse interests that converges around that
innovation. But even as such organizations learn about the
innovation, so too does the larger community. Community learning
takes place as its members reflect upon their learning and
contribute their experiences, observations, and insights to the
community’s on-going discourse on the innovation. Community learning
and organizational learning thus build upon one another in a
reciprocal cycle over time, as the stock of interpretations,
adoption rationales, implementation strategies, and utilization
patterns is expanded and refined. We advance an overall model of
this learning cycle, drawing on two community-level theories
(management fashion and organizing vision), both of which complement
the dominant emphases of the literature on IT innovation and
learning. Relative to this cycle, we then empirically examine, in
particular, the dependence of community learning on organizational
learning. Sampling the public discourse on enterprise resource
planning (ERP) over a 14-year period, we explore how different kinds
of organizational actors can play different roles, at different
times, in contributing different types of knowledge to an
innovation’s public discourse. The evidence suggests that research
analysts and technology vendors took leadership early on in
articulating the "know-what" (interpretation) and "know-why"
(rationales) for ERP, while later on adopters came to dominate the
discourse as its focus shifted to the "know-how" (strategies and
capabilities). We conclude by identifying opportunities for further
inquiry on and strategic management of community learning and its
interactions with organizational learning.
Keywords: Information technology innovation, innovation
community, community learning, learning-about, discourse, management
fashion, organizing vision