Applying or drifting? How participants’ individual learning during open strategy initiatives influence their attitude towards openness

A central question for open strategy is to convince lower-level participants to dedicate time and effort to participate. In this research, we try to uncover what benefits lower-levels participants gain from their participation by focusing on what individual learning takes place during open strategy initiatives and its value for participants' occupational activities. To do so, we compare two open strategy networks within the French National Railway Company, a bureaucratic organization that engaged in open strategy initiatives to prepare the opening up of competition on its national markets. We show that participation induced individual learning - new declarative, procedural and relational knowledge that is valuable in occupational work - and changes in participants' attitudes towards themselves and others that increase their disposition to openness and allow further learning beyond the boundaries of the open strategy initiatives. Our study contributes to open strategy literature by evidencing two ways by which participants learn during open strategy initiatives with different consequences in their occupational work. A first way of learning incrementally improves their occupational department's competences and the second ways of learning contributes to diffusing an openness disposition towards knowledge exchange and autonomous thinking that departs from the company's bureaucratic mindset.