平衡开发式创新和探索式创新一定有利于提升企业绩效吗？

Are Exploratory and Exploitative Innovations Bound to Enhance Firm Performance?

在日益动态的商业环境下,平衡开发式创新和探索式创新是企业兼顾当前和未来竞争所必须重视的问题。现有研究过度强调了同时重视开发式创新和探索式创新的二元平衡的价值,假设二元平衡是对任何企业都普遍适用的,但实证检验的结果却并非如此。本研究注意到资源紧缺条件对企业开发式创新和探索式创新平衡战略的影响,发展了资源紧缺条件下中国企业开发式创新和探索式创新的平衡理论,指出,开发式创新和探索式创新的平衡策略不仅有二元平衡,还有间断平衡,究竟哪种策略有效取决于企业资源约束条件决定的开发式创新和探索式创新之间究竟是正交关系还是竞争关系起主导作用。最后,本研究以新创企业和成熟企业的大规模调查数据的比较性实证研究证实了本文的主要理论假设。

Innovation,as a strategic response to the increasingly competitive dynamic environment,has attracted considerable attention from scholars and managers.The theoretic consensus is that organizations need to achieve a balance between spending limited resource on exploitation activities for survival and investing resource in exploration activities for future development.Most literatures agree that a firm should implement both exploitative and explorative innovations simultaneously,an ambidexterity strategy,in the increasingly competitive dynamic environment.However,ambidexterity strategy does not necessarily enhance firm performance.This paper is to understand why the empirical evidence is not consistent with theoretic predictions. Both explorative and exploitative innovations consume the resource of firms.This paper argues that two strategies are available to balance the resource allocation for excludability and non-excludability innovation activities.The ambidexterity strategy is that a firm always emphasizes explorative and exploitive innovations simultaneously in order to use redundant resources and their complementarities to improve performance.Thus,the ambidexterity strategy can enhance corporate performance only if resource redundancy is considerable.Ambidexterity will not balance the complementarities against excludability and can be harmful to firm performance.In other words,the ambidexterity strategy cannot improve a firm＇s performance when the resource is limited.Specifically in new ventures there are few redundant resources that can be used in ambidexterity strategy;actually,the resources used for both explorative and exploitive innovations are so scarce that there no redundant resources can be used for other innovations.Obviously,the ambidexterity strategy is not proper and even harmful to these new ventures. So,how do new enterprises balance current competition against future development？In the long run,a firm can focus on either exploitative or explorative innovation in each stage and switch to the other in the next stage according to external environment changes and internal resources.Gupta et al.refer this behavior as punctuated equilibrium.In fact,for mature organizations with many routines,it not easy to focus on explorative innovations that deny existing organization capabilities,much less adjustable for innovation strategies—from explorative to exploitative innovation.On the contrary,it is easy for new ventures to adjust innovation strategies.Furthermore,it is costly to for mature organizations to achieve punctuated equilibrium.The punctuated equilibrium strategy cannot improve the firm performance.Based on the data collected from 264 firms in the Pearl River Delta,this study finds that explorative,exploitative innovation,ambidexterity,and punctuated equilibrium have different effects in new ventures and mature organizations.For the new venture,explorative and exploitative innovations can improve the performance only if a firm has the basis for prominent innovations.For mature organizations,explorative innovations can help improve performance,and exploitative innovation relies on explorative innovation to affect performance. Our findings indicate that existing studies over-emphasize the simultaneous implementation of these two innovations and their synergic effect,but neglect resource competition.In fact,new ventures are common in China and generally face limited resources.The competition of resources by the two innovation activities is obvious.So,the theory about striking a balance between explorative and exploitive innovations has considerable theoretic values,especially in the context of scarce resource and competition.