환경 역동성과 탐색의 거리: 한국 하이테크 전자기업 탐험과 활용

Abstract

In this paper, we explored the market and environmental factors that may drive an organization’s technology search efforts through patent applications under dynamic environments. Unlike previous studies which have mainly focused on the consequences of exploration and exploitation, this study draws attention to a more contextual perspective, as the antecedents of exploration and exploitation, to explain and to elaborate on organizational adaptation – i.e. exploration and exploitation. This study empirically investigated factors affecting organizations’ strategic choices for carrying out a distant search rather than a local search or factors driving a local search rather than a distant search. We hypothesized that different market and environmental factors, such as exogenous shock, volatility, and complexity, may also induce greater organizational search distance. First, this study explored exogenous shock affecting organizational adaptation not only exogenously but also endogenously. Next, the effect of market volatility has been examined for whether it suppresses organizational change. Last, environmental complexity has been established through organizations’ surroundings and an investigation was done for suspected effects on organizational decision-making. The results of our analysis of technology search processes in the Korean high-tech electronics industry from 1994 to 2008 showed that these three environmental factors affected the search distance when they explored new technology domains, as predicted in our hypotheses. General implications on organizational search processes for researchers and practitioners are discussed.