Organizational Capital: Using Learning to Create Best Practices as a Strategic Tool

While formal and informal learning are evident in many organizations, some companies are starting to recognize the importance of both types of learning in terms of creating and developing more innovative ways and strategies to help both human capital and organizational capital. The Free Library (2011) acknowledged that knowledge held by individuals helps to form what we know as human capital, and social capital is the "collective exchange" of knowledge between people (workers). However, what do organizations really own since they do not own their workers, but rather they hire them to work for them? This leads to yet another area for examination towards learning more about organizations, especially learning organization, and how they use their institutional memory, knowledge, and experiences which are formally or informally learned, shared, or documented as part of their company's knowledge management. This type of information created, maintained, and stored can be found in the processes, procedures, policies, organizational documents, and other organizational documents that comprise what is called organizational capital. The organizational capital is sometimes that is tangible and owned by the organization and can be helpful to the organization and others. Thus, this leads us to explore and examine how organizations can used organizational capital in a learning organization, whether formally or informally, to best suit their current and future training needs.