Balancing Exploitation And Exploration

Patrick Schulze investigates the performance effects and organizational antecedents of innovation strategies and, in particular, ambidexterity.

Tatjana-Xenia Puhan demonstrates that ambidexterity need not necessarily be implemented in one single organization but can also be realised in a network of associated organizations. She develops the concept of think tanks as organizations which concentrate on radical innovations while their network associates exploit this newly generated knowledge commercially.

In order to stay efficient, companies need to improve their existing business processes on a continuous basis. To ensure competitive edge, it is essential for companies to adapt radically to new business opportunities and when external demands change. However, experience and research show that companies have difficulties managing both the continuous improvement of the existing system and radical change at the same time. By using TQM and BPR to represent the two approaches to change Tor Tønnessen contributes to the understanding of the challenges of this integration and shows ways to accomplish a successful synergistic combining of the two approaches.

Exploration and Exploitation is a key text for scholars and business practitioners interested in promoting economic well-being and sustainable growth. March’s work promotes the preservation of companies’ competitiveness and sustainability in the fluctuating market environment by maintaining a balance between exploration and exploitation processes. He explicates that this balance depends on the interchange between the adaptive capability of the company, predictability and consistency, competition, anticipations, level of risk, learning, socialization dynamics within the organization, and the overall environmental turbulence. These intricacies make March’s text invaluable.

This timely handbook represents the latest thinking in the field of technology and innovation management, with an up-to-date overview of the key developments in the field. Under the separate but related headings of market environment; business models; innovation processes; and organizational design; leading scholars contribute essays that chart the important debates and emergent issues in the field of technology and innovation management.

This volume of Technology, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Competitive Strategy is devoted to research aimed at understanding the implications of Exploration and Exploitation activities in early-stage ventures and small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs).

In this monograph, the focus is on two extreme cases in which the analysis of regret is particularly simple and elegant: independent and identically distributed payoffs and adversarial payoffs. Besides the basic setting of finitely many actions, it analyzes some of the most important variants and extensions, such as the contextual bandit model.