Exploratory And Exploitative Market Learning In Discontinuous New Product Development

This research presents the results of an inductive comparative case study of how exploratory and exploitative market learning is balanced during the development of eight discontinuous new product development projects in six different business units of different multinationals in the chemical industry. For these projects, all recently introduced into the market, the authors find market knowledge to be a multi-dimensional construct consisting of segment, product, application, and customer knowledge. They illustrate how a project's exploratory and exploitative market learning is balanced across market knowledge dimensions and over time.