Exploration or exploitation of knowledge from universities: does it make a difference?

Spyros Arvanitis and Martin Woerter

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2015, vol. 24, issue 6, 596-623

Abstract: In the first step, based on the existing theoretical and empirical literature, we develop a series of hypotheses with respect to the relative importance of possible determinants of exploration and exploitation of knowledge in collaboration with universities and test them on Swiss firm data. In the second step, we investigate the impact on innovation performance of knowledge exploration versus knowledge exploitation. We obtain a clear pattern of the differences between firms that are engaged both in exploitative and explorative activities ('exploration'-oriented firms) and purely 'exploitation'-oriented firms. We find that exploration-oriented firms have a greater knowledge absorptive capacity, are technologically more diverse and are strongly exposed to intensive non-price competition compared with exploitation-oriented firms. We further find a positive effect on innovation performance for exploitation-oriented firms but not for those that were exploration oriented.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10438599.2014.973294 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ecinnt:v:24:y:2015:i:6:p:596-623

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GEIN20

DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2014.973294

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Innovation and New Technology is currently edited by Professor Cristiano Antonelli

More articles in Economics of Innovation and New Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().