Strategies, decisions and operations for keeping exploitative and exploratory activities balanced

Sustainable competitive advantage of a firm may lie in the firm’s ability to exploit its current competencies while simultaneously exploring new capabilities. However, this is hard to be achieved at the same time. Therefore, a conceptual decision‐making framework is proposed to fulfil this task. First, to balance exploitation and exploration under punctuated equilibrium, a fuzzy analytic network process with goal programming is developed to help decision makers select the best projects under specific environments. Second, an executive committee, where experts use computer groupware with the Delphi technique to balance exploratory and exploitative activities flexibly, is formed to allocate limited resources during the implementation of the projects. After a practical investigation, the research concludes that the strategy targeted for balancing exploitation and exploration should be periodically adjusted, and the limited resources should be allocated during the execution of projects. Specifically, the proposed model for sustainable competitive advantage is recommended to practitioners in developing and implementing projects.