AND TASK COMPLEXITY IN BRITISH FERTILITY CLINICS

Research on organizational learning has shown that firms can improve their performance with experience. Studying fertility clinics, we examine how experience with IVF treatments is associated with an increase in the success rate for the standard patient group. Our findings indicate that clinics undertaking complex tasks - e.g. the treatment of patients with more complex profiles - increase their performance for the standard patient group. A second effect is that the extent of complex tasks undertaken in addition to technologically simple tasks positively moderates a firm's learning rate; we find that the learning rate for the standard patient group is greater under conditions of higher incidence of complex cases in the patient base. In general, this paper contributes to our understanding of what enables some organizations to learn quicker than others.