Technological Change and Learning: A Model of Manager Decisions and Teams Organisational Learning

The aim of this paper is to analyse the nature of the link between the technology adoption decision taken by managers of a firm and the technology implementation process within their teams of workers. Our main working hypothesis is that organisational forms, the way workers learn from each other within a team and technological change matter in the decisions taken by managers and thus, in the development and the story of the firm. Our work is supported by an agent-based model, which captures three main themes, namely technological change, workers competencies within a team, and learning. Our model assumes that the performance of a new technology depends on the workers competencies which in turn depend on their team interaction. The main result shows the importance of the managers' degree of preference for innovation in his understanding of the search process for the best possible technology. Overestimation mistakes made by managers lead them to switch too many times to a new technique, but the negative effects of this too high frequency is compensated by their team's capacity to learn faster.