Reflections on the 2013 Decade Award—“Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited” Ten Years Later

By Mary J. Benner, Michael L. Tushman. 2015

328 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reflects on our 2003 article, “Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited,” which received the Academy of Management Review’s Best Article Award in 2003 and Decade Award in 2013. We consider the context within which we wrote the original article, with particular reference to the theoretical, empirical, and managerial problems salient at that time, and comment on the likely reasons the article has had a sustained influence in the field. Looking forward, we first ask whether the paradoxes and inconsistencies we discussed are still fundamental organizational challenges, and then go further to consider ways the domain of innovation itself has changed. We suggest that because of fundamental shifts in communication and information processing costs and the increasing modularity of products and services, the nature and locus of innovation have changed over the past decade. These secular trends have profound implications for our theories of innovation and org...

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/767c9a674d9a4a5ec33a7260a4f6172c31ffca92

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In Computer Science Applications

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Citations in the corpus

Digital Innovation Management: Reinventing Innovation Management Research in a Digital World (2017, background): “For example, Benner and Tushman (2015) recently noted that because of the shift in the locus of innovation and because some of our core organizing axioms may be challenged or fundamentally changed by the digital revolution, the nature of innovation and organizational scholarship may be at a…”
Flexing the Frame: TMT Framing and the Adoption of Non-Incremental Innovations in Incumbent Firms (2017, positive): “Often, however, organizations do not adopt an innovation, even when they have the organizational capacity to do so (e.g., Landes, 1983), or they develop innovations they cannot execute (e.g., Benner & Tushman, 2015; Christensen, 1997).”
Switching Hats: The Effect of Role Transition on Individual Ambidexterity (2019, background): “Extant literature highlights the challenges of ambidextrous individuals navigating different organizational domains, with their associated knowledge, norms, and cultures (Benner & Tushman, 2015; Kauppila & Tempelaar, 2016).”