Exploration and Exploitation in Organisational Learning




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A week before the exam, you are gridding yourself and mustering your forces for the final assessments. Dying of boredom and humdrum, you have perceived in a bolt from the blue manner that you are ruminating about such a ceaseless, perpetual burgeoning epoch where everything is being come along by leaps and bounds and advancement is taking the lion’s share.

For some time, cogitation has upset the apple cart, why should I study, what will be the motive? Studying possesses only Barmecide's feasts; it will not be efficacious in making me a celebrity or devise something that can change the world. It will be a wild goose chase in making me a venerate Crichton.

A cornucopia of preponderant inventions and discoveries that are the breadwinner for life was as luck would have them. Copious scientists set the Thames on fire in an extemporaneous, extempore approach.

Some luck of the draw discoveries:

(1/2) For instance, X-rays were discovered fortuitously; this discovery was denoted as a scientific medical miracle. On a languid day in his laboratory, the German scientist Wilhelm Rontgen was deploying a cathode-ray tube. Then he kept tabs on a shine, light from this tube; he covered it with a dim barrier. He leapt out of his skin by dint of the light’s presence.

After taking a shufti, he cast a look when this ray could penetrate the human tissues, but they did not manage to do so in bones or metals. He told her wife to put her hand opposite to the ray; when his wife observed that, she was dazed uttering, "I have seen my own death" since they could not glimpse skeletons for people except for the dead. Courtesy of that, Rontgen was the first one to award the Nobel prize for his marvelous discovery.

(2/2) What is more, antibiotics were also arbitrarily found out. Alexander Fleming was not ardent of making his room tidy. In 1928, he travelled for three weeks, leaving manifold Petri dishes. When backing in harness, he stumbled upon a profusion of bacteria in the dishes.

This was mundane; however, there was a dish where there was only fungus devoid of bacteria. He queried endeavouring to tease an elucidation out. He became dubious about this fungus. He imputed that it killed the bacteria inside the dish.

After examining the fungus, he lighted on penicillin, given off by the fungus. Henceforth, penicillin was the linchpin of the first antibiotic. All these are just several drops in the sea. There is a raft of other things that were ascertained by chance like plastics, anaesthetics, super glue, Viagra, pacemaker, and sundry things. Those things put our fingers on myriad affairs for a better world. 

A While of Rumination

Something ran through your mind and sprang to mind; should I spend all the time studying, or go doing anything scraping through stumbling something upon to make a revolution in the world? Discovery is like the goal! It transpired in seconds.

Proceeding to rack your brains and put your thinking cap on this conundrum spending time in torrents, you have realized that this predicament is well-known in scientific society. Its outset was by James March when he posted a paper whose title is “Exploration and Exploitation in organizational learning.” Here are some examples.  

Exploration Devoid of Exploitation
 
(1/2) There was a Swedish company called Facit; they were consummate in manufacturing mechanical calculators. Moreover, there was a Japanese company that makes electronic calculators. Facit made a blunder then, which is continuing to produce the mechanical ones. Owing to that, Facit has deteriorated.

It was about to bankrupt. It is ironic since Facit engineers deployed electronic calculators to authenticate the results elicited by the mechanical. Attributable to flouting keeping pace with advancement and exploration, Facit was over. That means that exploitation is abysmal_ several primitive perceptions will rest upon so form this story.

(2/2) Here is another specimen. A Norwich expert talked about a company he worked for; he said that its name is Oncho search, a European biotech enterprise. There was a discovery every day in this company. It was expected that these discoveries if utilized, would be able to diagnose and surmount heinous diseases like blood cancer.

However, this company spends its money on exploration without focusing on any number of these innovations. On account of that, its destiny was not different from Facit.

Prosperous Companies

You are in a cleft stick, between the devil and the sea, Scylla, and Charybdis; on the other hand, you got the solution_ making a poise amid exploration and exploitation; getting to know how to spend your resources in each one. This may occasion mentioning one of the most famous companies in history, Nokia! Is this deriding? No, it is not.

After deterioration which was set in train since 2007 with the appearance of Apple products and Nokia’s mobile business sold to Microsoft in 2014. They put their resources in high-end networking gear. Furthermore, it has sold a plethora of software to communication companies. It was able to earn 14 billion dollars by virtue of that in 2015.

Here is Microsoft; its most famous product is windows. However, it brings just 9 per cent of its profit! what about the others? 22 per cent of its profits are from azure, its cloud computing services_ a brand-new thing that Microsoft is not inured to. Moving to amazon, its earning does not come only from E-commerce; it makes the services of cloud computing and deals with individuals, organizations, and governments. 


Laconically, the en passant noted companies - Nokia, Microsoft, and Amazon are capable of accustomed with this era, exploit their merits and develop them. Meanwhile, they managed to vie for catching up with this epoch of renaissance and prosperity and being part and parcel in the changes in the world.

This poise amongst this business in innovative approaches, and what they are expert in is what make them prosperous, triumphant, and thriving more and more along with augmenting their ability to invest in them again. 

Wittily, it is indispensable to exploit your erudition to survive. At the same time, you ought to explore new things to maintain survival. Indubitably, the child only explores in his life’s inception, and when he grows up and have knowledge he focuses on a specific major, ergo exploitation mounts and exploration diminishes, he must be in a crusade for searching for new things like companies, no less! 



- Written by Mohammad Hassan (EMN Community Member From Egypt)

- Edited by Mridul Goyal (EMN Community Member From New Delhi, India)