Knowledge exploration and exploitation in team context

Abstract

Knowledge exploration and exploitation are themes of interest for researchers, as these processes are able to generate innovation, improvement of processes and products, and competitive advantage. A variety of contributions on the topic indicates that teamwork supports knowledge exploration and exploitation. However, there is a gap in the literature concerning the analysis of the impact of the teamwork characteristics in these two processes. Therefore, this study is based on the recognised input-mediators-output model to collect the characteristics of the teams, in addition to relating them to the processes of knowledge exploration and exploitation. This research is based on a survey involving 252 companies of the capital goods industry. Results show that both processes are supported, especially by factors related to the knowledge integration and the collaborative culture.

Keywords:

• knowledge exploration
• knowledge exploitation
• teamwork
• capital goods industry
• partial least squares

Acknowledgements

The author thanks National Council for Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq (Process number: 445205/2014-8) and São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP (2016/24401-2) for the financial support, and Espaço da Escrita – Unicamp for having translated the manuscript into English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico [Grant Number 445205/2014-8]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo [Grant Number 2016/24401-2].