Bite Off What You Can Chew? Knowledge Acquisition Strategy and the Evolution of Absorptive Capacity

Abstract

I present a computational study to examine a common assumption in organizational learning, that an exploitative knowledge acquisition strategy will accumulate less diverse knowledge than an explorative strategy. I show that this is not always the case: When taking into account factors that influence the ease of knowledge acquisition, such as sensitivity of absorptive capacity to knowledge distance, requirement for repeated engagements with particular knowledge, and depreciation of knowledge due to forgetting, sometimes an exploitative strategy can outperform an explorative strategy both in terms of acquisition success rate and diversity of the resulting knowledge stock.