Iterative Coordination in Search
Sourobh Ghosh · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018
Despite their widespread use in product development and entrepreneurship practice, the influence of highly iterative project management frameworks on organizational search remains largely understudied in the strategy and innovation literatures. With a leading software development firm, we embed a field experiment within a one-day software app development hackathon to measure the effects of rapid iteration on new product search outcomes. We find that firms that iterate more frequently are more productive overall in their holistic search effort, but must face fundamental trade-offs between pursuing exploitative search and exploratory search. While rapidly iterating firms were more likely to sample distant neighborhoods on their search landscape, they ultimately invested in exploitative search at the expense of exploratory search. Our study offers a critical test of the popular project management framework, Agile software development, and places caveats on its professed link to innovation. Our findings contribute to the literatures on organizational search and the microfoundations of strategy making in entrepreneurial settings. Methodologically, we offer novel contributions to the strategy literature by instrumenting for search using industry leading version control software, Git.