View article

How and where organisations search for knowledge and solutions to problems are critical issues in a highly competitive environment. Some organisations have a tendency toward local search, others prefer global search, and yet others attempt to blend both local and global search strategies. What organisations discover through these search strategies and the strategic options they choose are vital to their success. Using institutional theory, we argue that we can better understand organisations| search strategies through a stages of development framework. First, we integrate the institutional theory and organisation development literatures to develop a contingency approach to knowledge search and an understanding of how organisations adopt their search strategies. Second, we suggest that firms employ different search strategies based on their stage of development. These differences in search strategies reflect …