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