Balancing market exploration and market exploitation in product innovation: A contingency perspective ¬リニ

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Market exploration Market exploitation Customer need tacitness New product innovativeness New product development speed New product financial performance This paper examines three different ways to balance market exploration and market exploitation in product innovation. First, following the knowledge-based view, we examine whether market exploration and market exploitation have differential effects on various new product outcomes based on their different learning mechanisms. We find that market exploration facilitates new product innovativeness, whereas market exploitation is more beneficial for new product development speed. This indicates that market exploration and market exploitation influence new product financial performance via distinct paths. Second, we examine the interaction between market exploration and market exploitation on new product outcomes. Our findings indicate that the joint effects of market exploration and market exploitation reduce new product development speed and have no significant impact on new product innovativeness. Third, we examine the contingent role of customer need tacitness in influencing the effects of market exploration and market exploitation. Our results show that customer need tacitness strengthens the effects of market exploration on both new product innovativeness and new product development speed. In contrast, it weakens the effect of market exploitation on new product innovativeness, and has no significant influence on new product development speed. Our results provide specific guidelines for managers regarding how to achieve a balance between market exploration and market exploitation in product innovation. In product innovation, firms are required to acquire and utilize market information efficiently and effectively in order to meet customer needs (e. current literature has distinguished between two types of market learning activities in an organization: market exploration and market exploitation (e.g. Kim & Atuahene-Gima, 2010; Kyriakopoulos & Moorman, 2004). Market exploration refers to the search and pursuit of completely new knowledge and skills outside the firm's current product market, whereas market exploitation emphasizes the use and refinement of existing knowledge and skills in the current product market. Due to the distinction and tension between these two learning activities, recent studies have devoted to finding solutions for achieving organizational ambidexterity that allows a firm to simultaneously exploit existing competencies and explore new opportunities (e. and there lacks consensus in the current literature on how to achieve this goal within and across organizations (e. This study aims to contribute to the existing literature by providing our perspective regarding how to balance market …