TY - JOUR
T1 - Revisiting James March (1991)
T2 - Whither exploration and exploitation?
AU - Wilden, Ralf
AU - Hohberger, Jan
AU - Devinney, Timothy M.
AU - Lavie, Dovev
N1 - Funding Information:
Dovev Lavie acknowledges fellowship with the ICRIOS (Invernizzi Center for Innovation, Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2018/8/1
Y1 - 2018/8/1
N2 - We revisit March’s seminal 1991 article, “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning”, and analyze the impact it has had on scholarly thinking, providing a comprehensive and structured review of the extensive and diverse research inspired by this publication. We show that although this influence has changed significantly over the years, there are still unexplored opportunities left by this seminal work. Our approach enables us to identify promising directions for future research that reinforce the themes anchored in March’s article. In particular, we call for reconnecting current research to the behavioral roots of this article and uncovering the microfoundations of exploration and exploitation. Our analysis further identifies opportunities for integrating this framework with resource-based theories and considering how exploration and exploitation can be sourced and integrated within and across organizational boundaries. Finally, our analysis reveals prospects for extending the notions of exploration and exploitation to new domains, but we caution that such domains should be clearly delineated. We conclude with a call for further research on the antecedents of exploration and exploitation and for studying their underexplored dimensions.
AB - We revisit March’s seminal 1991 article, “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning”, and analyze the impact it has had on scholarly thinking, providing a comprehensive and structured review of the extensive and diverse research inspired by this publication. We show that although this influence has changed significantly over the years, there are still unexplored opportunities left by this seminal work. Our approach enables us to identify promising directions for future research that reinforce the themes anchored in March’s article. In particular, we call for reconnecting current research to the behavioral roots of this article and uncovering the microfoundations of exploration and exploitation. Our analysis further identifies opportunities for integrating this framework with resource-based theories and considering how exploration and exploitation can be sourced and integrated within and across organizational boundaries. Finally, our analysis reveals prospects for extending the notions of exploration and exploitation to new domains, but we caution that such domains should be clearly delineated. We conclude with a call for further research on the antecedents of exploration and exploitation and for studying their underexplored dimensions.
KW - James March
KW - Leximancer
KW - ambidexterity
KW - bibliometric analysis
KW - exploitation
KW - exploration
KW - organizational learning
KW - text mining
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85044387566&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1476127018765031
DO - 10.1177/1476127018765031
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85044387566
SN - 1476-1270
VL - 16
SP - 352
EP - 369
JO - Strategic Organization
JF - Strategic Organization
IS - 3
ER -