Balancing Exploration and Exploitation Through Customer Development Model

Abstract

Balancing exploration and exploitation in entrepreneurial ventures enabled by Industry 4.0 has not been the focus of the existing literature. It is because the phenomenon is emerging and the focus has been to use practitioners' best practices in studying such phenomenon. In this chapter, the author combines the literature in balancing exploration and exploitation with the practitioners' best practices such as customer development model and lean startup. The author proposes that the existing models are good in principle but in order to really solve the problem in such an uncertain environment driven by big data, cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence, managers need to embed optimization algorithms in their decision making.