Sara L. Beckman

Sara L. Beckman is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Her work includes design, innovation, and operations. With Linda Argote and Dennis Epple, she coauthored the 1990 Management Science paper “The Persistence and Transfer of Learning in Industrial Settings.”

Using data from multiple organizations, the researchers found that knowledge gained through production could depreciate rapidly. Their results challenge a simple assumption behind capability compounding: that experience, once acquired, remains fully available for future work. The paper also finds some evidence of learning across organizations before production begins, but not continued benefit from other organizations’ learning after production starts. These findings concern the industrial settings studied; they do not establish a universal rate of knowledge loss. For OutcomesLab’s article, Beckman’s coauthored research supplies an important test of whether accumulated practice is actually retained.