The impact of organizational learning ability on product innovation performance: A survey from manufacturing sector

The rapid changes and transformations in social, cultural and economic area forced today?s organizations to compete in knowledge-intensive and a dynamic environment. These changes and transformations have brought up new methods and techniques in management thinking. Since the 1990s, the concepts of organizational learning and innovation have become a phenomenon that are explicated and discussed frequently both in literature and business world.While the concept of organizational learning is defined as encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behaviour; organizational learning ability is defined as the capability of the organization to implement the appropriate management practices, structures and procedures that facilitate and encourage learning. Organizational learning ability is closely related to the new product development process, because it facilitates obtaining, distributing and storing information.In this context, the main purpose of this study is to state the effect of organization learning ability on product innovation performance with an empirical research. In the study, a survey was applied to 120 product firms that are registered to Istanbul Chamber of Industry and in the list of ISO 1000, to determine the relationship between the dimensions of organizational learning and the dimensions of product innovation performance. The results of the research indicate that there is a positive relationship between the organizational learning ability and product innovation performance and learning-oriented organizational culture has a moderator effect on this relationship, while flexible organizational structure does not have a moderator effect on the relationship between these two variables. At the same time, there is a positive relation between the characteristics of the environment in which organizations operate and both organizational learning ability and product innovation performance.Key Words: Organizational learning ability, product innovation performance, learning-oriented organizational culture, organizational structure.