Learning organization
Responding to market requirements in the end of XX century, many business en-
terprises initiated the structure transformation, aimed at the optimal use of the unique
knowledge about business and ways to achieve stable success, which the enterprises
have accumulated in the process of their business life (Evenko 1998).
Dynamics of the business processes has achieved such level when even a narrow
gap between education and practice becomes more than expensive and inadmissible. In
early 1980s that gap began to develop in the chain «business education - entrepreneur-
ship», in spite of the widely practiced MBA programs in courses of business-schools,
which had the main goal to prepare high quality business managers. However research-
ers have outlined the serious break of MBA graduates from the real life and their inabil-
ity to react to possibilities and risks, to promote a corporation’s survival and to favor the
development in the changeable and highly competitive business world. The situation
was kept in plenty of cases in spite of the perfect business school’s teaching programs,
including all functions of the company. All managers have more or less similar set of
skills and as a result they could not create competitive advantage of the firm — to make
the company unique through their knowledge.
In that situation, aspiring to correspond to this fact business schools began to
modify their approaches to MBA programs. The traditional methods have been changed
to create flexible courses, selected disciplines and individual plans. The teaching pro-
grams were reoriented towards the solution of practical tasks for the appointed group of
students in specific conditions. Today graduates represent leaders, who can manage
both personnel and knowledge.
Unfortunately this tendency is developing not as intensively as it is necessary
for entrepreneurship needs. Researchers emphasize that the teaching system, based on
the stable scientific disciplines and formal transmission of experience, still prevails in
the practice of even the most progressive business schools. But as the real business
practice shows, that system cannot provide the development of creative leaders.
Since the breach between the real managerial problems and managers’ education
continued to exist, enterprises started to seek the ways of gaining intellectual capital,