Strategy as Balanced Evolution

In our study we address the question of how firms can create the necessary boundary conditions on the corporate strategy level to enable a balance between exploitative and explorative organizational learning. This paper thereby contributes to the rising number of studies, about the strategic and organizational context for exploitation and exploration. We develop a conceptual model of balanced evolution, suggesting speci-fic corporate development behaviours which influence exploitation and exploration as well as learning performance. In order to test the model, a set of research proposi-tions is derived from the existing literature and operationalized for empirical investi-gation.