Gone With the Wind? A Longitudinal Study of Explorative Innovation in a Growing Wind Turbine Blade Technology Company

摘要

Many scholars have stressed the need for balancing exploitation with sufficient levels of exploration. For growing companies, maintaining sufficient levels of exploration is challenging. They tend to develop core capabilities for exploitation of current success. The more these become embedded, the more challenging it becomes to transition the organization toward revival of exploration. Previous studies have emphasized the complexity of balancing exploration and exploitation levels and have provided insights into structural and individual factors that influence them. However, only few have unravelled the process of how these structural and individual factors affect changing exploration levels. The purpose of this paper is to provide in-depth insights into the dynamics of a growing organization's exploration levels and to explain how structural and individual factors impact these over time. In order to do so, we conduct a single case study in a fast growing R&D organization in the wind turbine blade industry. Based on a unique collection of time-accounting data and descriptions of 384 R&D projects conducted between 2003-2011, we are able to measure the dynamics of exploration levels, visualizing in great detail how a firm goes through transitions from focus on exploration to exploitation and vice versa. Based on a series of interviews, we demonstrate how structural and individual factors interact and impact this evolution. Together our findings provide new insights into multi-level interactions among antecedents of exploration, in particular between slack resources, formalization, tenure and cognitive style. For practitioners, the method we present could serve as a tool to detect exploration trends and evaluate the effectiveness of innovation policy. Our findings also help managers to understand and tackle the challenges involved in the transformation process of growing R&D organizations from decline to recovery of exploration.