Making Sense of Learning Landscapes in Project-Based Organizations

Recent years have seen an increasing ‘projectification’ of organizations (Söderlund, 2000). There are several reasons for this trend. With increasing complexity of products and underlying knowledge bases, interdisciplinary projects form an important organizational device for accessing and integrating the breadth and depth of knowledge pertinent to products (Grant, 1996). Moreover, as lead times and time to market shrink, project-based forms of organizing allow for focusing on specific tasks within certain time limits and therefore contribute to customer focus and quality orientation in organizations. In this chapter the authors explore some implications of project-based organizing for organizational learning.