(Note: This post refers to “How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an Old Case Study” (2001) and “How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Forget?” (2007), both by Peter Thompson.)
It’s taken for granted now that organizations “learn” as their workers gain knowledge while producing and “forget” when not actively involved in some project. Identifying the importance of such learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting is quite a challenging empirical task. We would need a case where an easily measurable final product was produced over and over by different groups using the same capital and technology, with data fully recorded. And a 1945 article by a man named Searle found just an example: the US Navy Liberty Ships. These standardized ships were produced by the thousand by a couple dozen shipyards during World War II. Searle showed clearly that organizations get better at making ships as they accumulate experience…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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