Exploration in technological innovations with external partners

Abstract

Although the existent literature has provided us with great insights on technological exploration and exploitation, there are still underdeveloped areas that deserve further investigations. Since companies are inclined to the refinement and improvement of an existing technology (exploitation) and overlook the opportunities to explore new knowledge that departs in a significant way from the existing practices, exploration naturally deserves more attention, in my opinion. The purpose of this thesis, thus, is to extend our knowledge on exploration in technological innovation by taking into account some important endogenous or exogenous factors that might affect a firm’s exploration in technological innovation. This purpose can be translated into a general research question that is, What are the important factors that may have influence on a firm’s exploration in technological innovation? And how are these factors related to the exploration of firms? I confine my attention to one single domain of organizational research—technological innovation—because technological innovation is considered as a critical competitive capability for growth and adaptation (Schumpeter, 1934), and it demonstrates a firm’s capability of effective organizational learning (Von Hippel, 1994). However, to answer the research questions, there are at least two important issues to be determined. This is because after the seminal work of March in 1991, a great number of researchers studied the notion of exploitation and exploration from different perspectives. These studies displayed to some extent variety in the levels of analysis and inconsistency in the interpretation of exploitation and exploration. Therefore, the starting point of this research project is to review the existent literature on technological innovation that has been published since March’s work (1991). Based on the literature review, firstly I try to determine the level of analysis for this study; secondly, to identify the determinant factors in some underdeveloped areas on exploration in technological innovation, upon which I frame three specific sub-research questions of this study.