Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2025
In this chapter, we are going to look at how organizations can combine exploitative and explorative learning. If they can it would after all challenge some of the theoretical preconceptions that Abernathy and March would give us and raise serious questions about whether Creative Destruction is in fact the inevitable threat that Schumpeter made it out to be. As it turns out, there are multiple “recipes” for how to effectively combine exploration and exploitation, based on a variety of empirical observations, that might make us less confident in the generalizability of the Productivity Dilemma. Zooming in on Communities of Practice, we are also invited to think through whether at some levels of the organization the distinction between exploration and exploitation even makes sense while Cohen and Levinthal’s work invites us to reconsider whether it is actually a problem that firms specialize in either exploration or exploitation. After all, they could always collaborate with other organizations that do well what they themselves do not.
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