MORSe (Management and Organization Research Seminars): "Mapping Localness of Search in New Problem-Solving Domains: The Antecedents of Exploration"

30th of April
Room 251
12.30 to 14.00
Natasha Munshi (Wright State University)

Presentation of the paper "Mapping Localness of Search in New Problem-Solving Domains: The Antecedents of Exploration"

This paper examines the role of experience in an old domain in the navigation of a novel problem-solving domain to discover how exploratory search begins. We focus on what real founders of new ventures who lack prior relevant experience do when faced with extremely limited or no substantive knowledge of their new entrepreneurial domain. Experience is fundamental to search in four steps: first, it helps to learn about what valuable problems to solve (problem identification), second, how and where to search for solutions to these problems (structuring the search), third, shows the connection between the problems and the solutions and finally, their effects on performance goals (evaluation of the solutions). We suggest that localness or experience will be leveraged in how these founders ‘come to know’ what they know rather than ‘what they know’ about how to search in the novel domain. We show that despite the lack of content knowledge in the new domain, these individuals use elements of localness from their prior knowledge domains to navigate the new one as rarely is a search started with a blank slate. We refer to these local elements as maps and draw on extant literature on search to describe four dimensions of localness - intellectual (cognitive), social, spatial (geographic), and institutional (norms and cultural values) in terms of their content – that are used as initial anchors in the search process in the new domain. We argue that elements of localness that may have previously been unchallenged and are breached the fastest, i.e., are the weakest, lead to new maps emerging in the novel domain. We believe that the mapping of localness in new problem solving domains is one useful way to analyze how exploratory search begins. Case studies in the biotechnology sector are used to provide empirical evidence for the mapping of the dimensions of localness in the origins of exploratory search.