Increasingly, organizations collaborate to complement their core competenci
es. New product development, for example, is often a collaborative process,
with customers and suppliers contributing complementary knowledge and skil
ls. This study uses grounded theory to determine how and why information te
chnology facilitates interorganizational learning. Semi-structured intervie
ws in the disk drive industry were coded to develop a conceptual model. An
important finding is that organizations collaborate closely through virtual
integration. They need interorganizational learning to help them cope with
the complexity of new products and the capital intensity in the disk drive
industry. However, effective interorganizational collaboration needs trust
. The main contribution of the model is in explaining the role of informati
on technology in lower and higher levels of interorganizational learning, c
ognitive and affective trust, and virtual and humanistic interorganizationa
l collaboration.