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This paper examines the impact of the macro-institutional environment on exploitative-explorative innovation. Building on organizational learning, institutional economics, and innovation studies, we identify country-level institutions that might foster or hinder firms’ incentives and ability to explore or exploit. We test our conjectures by analyzing all patented firm innovations in 22 countries over the 1985-2008 timeframe. Empirical tests demonstrate the role of national institutions in explaining cross-country differences in the level of exploitative and exploratory innovation. The results also suggest that firms’ incentives to explore are influenced by changes in the institutions that regulate the ecology of competition in an economy.

In this paper, we build on research on the microfoundations of strategy and learning processes to study the individual underpinnings of organizational learning. We argue that once an individual has accumulated a certain amount of experience with a task, the benefit of accumulating additional experience is inferior to the benefit of deliberately articulating and codifying the experience accumulated in the past. We explain the superior performance outcomes associated with such deliberate learning efforts using both a cognitive (improved task understanding) and an emotional (increased self-efficacy) mechanism. We study the proposed framework by means of a mixed-method experimental design that combines the reach and relevance of a field experiment with the precision of two laboratory experiments. Our results support the proposed theoretical framework and bear important implications from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint.