Corporate Exploration Competence and the Entrepreneurial Enterprise
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Corporate Exploration Competence and the Entrepreneurial Enterprise Raphael Klein & Uzi de Haan & Albert I. Goldberg
Received: 20 December 2009 / Accepted: 21 December 2009 / Published online: 8 January 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract To sustain competitive advantage, entrepreneurial enterprises utilize all sources for innovation, including external intellectual properties and creative work. To access these knowledge resources effectively, they must develop and sustain corporate exploration competence, a dynamic capability built on a foundation of absorptive capacity and enabled by appropriate organizational culture and structure. A study of medical imaging firms reveals the nature of corporate exploration competence. Firms with high corporate exploration competence have a culture dominated by an open innovation vision and supported by formal and informal norms. Employees with professional expertise and social skills who are capable of exploration are mandated to perform roles as informant (listening), scout (observing), and prospector (entrepreneurial). External actors such as technology transfer agencies and firms and technology brokers can assist in and even catalyze external exploration. Learning feedback loops are used to increase the absorptive capacity of actors and organization. Keywords Corporate exploration competence . Entrepreneurial enterprise . Professional expertise
Introduction It is now well accepted that established technology firms must become “ambidextrous” to achieve optimal balance between exploitation and exploration [84], build entrepreneurial capabilities, and continuously innovate in order to survive long term. To augment their in-house research and development (R&D), such firms could avail themselves of external R&D, by now a proven resource of intellectual property (IP) and creative work. Such IP comes in tangible and intangible forms of inventions and R. Klein (*) : U. de Haan : A. I. Goldberg Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel e-mail: [email protected]
J Knowl Econ (2010) 1:86–116
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technologies that can be the basis for or merely assist in developing incremental as well as disruptive products by the firms. In recent years, a new model of business based on “open innovation” has been espoused [20]. We introduce the construct of corporate exploration competence as a dynamic capability, important to strategic management in achieving ambidexterity. The proposed theoretical foundation for corporate exploration competence uses the strategic management framework of resource-based view (RBV) to integrate organizational entrepreneurial capabilities with organizational absorptive capacity (ACAP) [25] into the dynamic capability of corporate exploration competence. Corporate ACAP enables organizations to recognize opportunities, evaluate their market potential and technical feasibility, and make decisions toward utilizing them. Our study focused on the interdisciplinary field of medical imaging that integrates medicine, biology, physics, elec
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