Organisational knowledge stocks used in subsequent new radical products development

What is it about?

Exploitation uses existing knowledge while exploration uses knowledge new to the respective organisations (March, 1991). Despite the important role that exploitation plays in innovation and new product development, research on the relative impact of internal organisational stocks of existing knowledge on subsequent exploitation is largely absent. In particular, there is a lack of clarity within the extant literature regarding the associations between organisational exploitation and, respectively, the distal-proximal technological experience and radical-incremental innovative experience generated by multiproduct firms. Given this, this study seeks to further enhance our theoretical understanding on the relationship between organisational exploitation and internal knowledge stocks categorised along two dimensions of organisational experience accumulated by multiproduct firms that have not previously been considered jointly.

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Why is it important?

To fill a research gap regarding the possible relationships between subsequent exploitative endeavours and two dimensions of organisational experience that have been traditionally associated with the exploration-exploitation construct, this paper proposes and develops a novel typology of knowledge stocks categorised along two dimensions of organisational experience accumulated by multiproduct firms that have not previously been considered jointly in the literature.