Dig deeper or diversify? The rewards and penalties of knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities in the context of IS scholar publication productivity

We develop a model of knowledge creation in rapidly changing academic disciplines and posit that it is important for scholars in such environments to explore a variety of knowledge domains as opposed to focusing on narrow domains to ensure publication productivity. We hypothesize that in the IS domain, an example of a rapidly changing knowledge environment, explorative knowledge capability will positively impact knowledge creation. On the other hand, exploitative knowledge capability will penalize the researcher by negatively impacting knowledge creation. Using bibliometric information of IS scholars who published in top 10 IS journals from 2000-2011, we perform a co-citation analysis and identify the key IS knowledge domains. Using indices borrowed from ecology and economics, we operationalize explorative and exploitative knowledge capabilities based on a researcher's breadth and depth of previous publications in those knowledge domains. Results from a regression analysis of 91 IS scholars provide strong evidence for our hypotheses.