Absorption Capacity
The real challenge of digital disruption isn't technology itself but how quickly organizations can absorb it.
Wesley M. Cohen and Daniel A. Levinthal introduced the concept of =="absorptive capacity" – an organization's ability to identify, assimilate, transform, and use external knowledge. Simply put: the more a company knows, the more it can learn. This capacity isn't just the sum of individual employees' knowledge but depends on how information flows throughout the organization.==
Companies can cultivate this capacity by diversifying talent, developing employees' digital skills, improving environmental sensing mechanisms, and increasing internal information flow velocity.
As Cohen and Levinthal note, organizations must "learn how to learn" – because without continuous experimentation, integrating new knowledge becomes increasingly difficult over time.