Corporate universities – an analytical framework

The purpose of this article is to offer a contribution to enabling an understanding of the concept of the corporate university to be developed. This contribution is in the form of a conceptual framework, drawing on the significant concepts of knowledge management, organisational learning and learning organisation. The resulting framework – corporate university wheel – represents what might be termed an “ideal type”, in the Weberian sense, of a corporate university based human resource development strategy. Though the framework is offered as a descriptive and analytical device rather than as a prescriptive model, it highlights four core processes which, it is argued, represent the key functions that an ideal type corporate university should perform. The paper suggests that the success of corporate universities of the future could hinge on their ability to manage and harness the complex interaction of organisational learning subsystems and less on their ability to manage training and education programmes.