Developing an executive learning community: Focus on collective creation

The preoccupation within executive education with addressing relevance and resource constraints, with developing the capacity of participants to become reflexive practitioners, and with sustaining long-lasting change in organizations calls for new innovations and formats for executive education. Building on theories of the collective creation of value and learning communities, and employing a methodology based on narrative ethnography, we empirically investigated how collective creation is facilitated to develop a learning community in executive education with a longitudinal study of learning camps. The study demonstrated how improvisational theater activities can strengthen collective creation to foster the development of a learning community and how the sense of community supports collective creation. The study develops a framework for developing executive learning communities.