Such studies are built on the assumption that a firm’s accumulation of experience in
a focal activity makes it possible to repeat the action in a similar way. This
assumption derives from the experience curve literature, which suggests that
repeated engagements in an activity produce benefits through learning by doing:
such benefits seem to derive from drawing inferences, encoding, storing and saving
experience (Levitt and March 1988). As individuals remember skills by practising
them, in the same way organizations remember activities by doing them. That is to
say, the skills of an organization lie in their routines and in the operational
knowledge which derives from the routinization of an activity (Nelson and Winter
1982: 99).