Exploration or Exploitation of Knowledge from Universities: Does It Make a Difference?

Abstract

In a first step, we developed based on existing theoretical and empirical literature a series of hypotheses with respect to the relative importance of possible determinants of exploration and exploitation of knowledge in collaboration with universities and tested them on Swiss firm data. In a second step, we investigated the impact on innovation performance of knowledge exploration versus knowledge exploitation. We obtained a clear pattern of the differences between ‘exploration’-oriented and ‘exploitation’-oriented firms. We found that explorationoriented firms have a greater knowledge absorptive capacity, are technologically more diverse, and they are less exposed to intensive price competition compared to exploitationoriented firms. We further found a positive effect on innovation performance for explorationoriented firms but not for those that were exploration-oriented.