Exploratory Learning, Innovative Capacity, and Managerial Oversight.

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Academy of Management is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Academy of Management Journal.When adaptation requires innovation, or the creation of variety, exploration is crucial. High levels of exploration thus imply variance-seeking rather than mean-seeking learning processes. In a study of 56 new business development projects, given high exploration, organizational learning was more effective when the projects operated with autonomy with respect to goals and supervision. As degree of exploration decreased, better results were associated with less autonomy on both counts. This contingent effect persisted even when I controlled for the emergence of deftness and comprehension.To survive in Schumpeterian environments, organizations must be able to cope with increasing complexity and high-velocity change (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998;Schumpeter, 1950). The principle of requisite variety suggests that effective adaptation requires sufficient internal variety (Ashby, 1952). Internal variety, in turn, is associated with exploration (March, 1991), involving the search for new organizational routines and the discovery of new approaches to technologies, businesses, processes, or products. Internal variety is relevant to several theoretical traditions: it is viewed as determination to gain new information at the expense ofimproving present returns in the rational choice model, as the core element of search in theories of limited rationality, as invention in theories of organizational learning, and as the pursuit of variation in evolutionary models. In short, exploratory learning is critical to the capacity of an organization to create variety, and hence, to adapt.Although the importance of learning to adaptation is hardly controversial, managing exploratory learning is not well understood. My purpose in this study was to examine how managerial oversight processes influenced exploratory learning in new business development projects.One perspective on learning emphasizes discovery through enactment and interpretation. Retrospective sense making acts as a selection mechanism (Daft & Weick, 1984;Weick, 1979). Success depends upon generating enough variations that at least some will prove ex post to yield desirable results. The consequence of this form of learning is increased performance variance.

Convergent Innovation in Emerging Healthcare Technology Ecosystems: Addressing Complexity and Integration

“…In addressing uncertainty, McGrath (2001) confirms the earlier findings of March (1991) that the degree of exploration is important; broader searches across more variety can improve performance. The dynamic capability literature points to the use of sensing, seizing, and transforming to better manage uncertainty (Teece et al, 2016), with abduction (as a mode of inference) being important to create new thinking for subsequent testing.…”

Creativity at work as a joint function between openness to experience, need for cognition and organizational fairness

“…In order to remain adaptive and competitive in a constantly changing environment, organizations have to be open to learning processes (Edmondson, 2008;McGrath, 2001). As such, organizational learning -the process of developing knowledge for continuously improving organizational actions -should be greatly served by employee creativity.…”

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“…For instance, Tomlinson (2010), McKenzie et al (2009) and Shefer and Frenkel (2005) linked innovation to firm size and age. Other studies associated innovation with such factors as government support and cooperation with academia (Ho and Yang, 2012), top management support and leadership style (De Tienne and Mallette, 2012) and organizational culture (Du Plessis, 2007).…”