FUTURE competitive advantage will be founded on the human resources of organisations, the Minister for Enterprise and Employment told a business conference in Dublin yesterday on the theme of "Shaping Tomorrow's organisation".
Representatives of almost 100 private and public-sector organisations attended what the Minister, Mr Bruton, described as a "master class about how to develop the culture of the learning organisation".
Introducing the conference, which was organised by the Institute of Personnel and Development in association with The Irish Times, Mr Bruton said that Government policy was to "encourage and facilitate business to grasp ownership of developing its skill base up to, and beyond, best international practice".
He continued: "for the future, sustainable competitive advantage in my view, cannot be achieved by traditional methods. One can no longer achieve differentiation on a single-dimension basis, such as low pricing strategies or speed to market.
"Sustainable competitive advantage for the future will be founded on the human resource capability of firms."
Mr Mike Goodman, of Innovation Associates, said that the greatest barriers to change were "inside people's heads". While we were very good at reacting to crises, we allowed the urgent to take priority over the important.
Organisations not prepared to put learning infrastructures into place would continue to be reactive. However, there were no easy ways to build a learning organisation. "We're where medical science was 100 years ago", he said.
The director of the IPD, Mr Mike McDonnell, said that the learning organisation was the next stage in business development, but we were "failing miserably, in companies and state institutions, Lo get the message across".