Abstract In a rapidly changing and intensively competitive environment, it is necessary for firms to implement such two patterns of organizational learning as exploratory learning and exploitative learning in order to have competitive advantage in new product development (NPD). With the new knowledge brought by exploratory learning, firms may develop new products to gain new customers and enter into new markets. By exploitative learning, firms utilize their existing knowledge to improve their products and increase customer satisfaction. As an important factor that affects organizational innovation behavior, entrepreneurial orientation (EO) describes a firm's strategic intentions and acts as the basis or foundation for its strategic decisions and actions. However, the extant research has so far not provided a ?ne-grained insight into the link between entrepreneurial orientation, learning patterns and NPD performance, which this paper intends to interpret on the basis of relevant theories and empirical findings from China’s 152 technology-based firms. First, we find that different dimensions of EO affect NPD performance in two ways: on one hand, EO directly affects the performance of NPD; on the other hand, EO indirectly affects NPD performance by influencing the organizational learning patterns. Specifically, among the five dimensions (autonomy, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and risk-taking) of EO in technology-based firms, both proactiveness and risk-taking positively affect a firm’s exploratory learning; autonomy, innovativeness and competitive aggressiveness positively affect its exploitative learning, and innovativeness, proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness positively affect its NPD performance. Second, we find that both exploratory learning and exploitative learning exhibit an inverted U-shaped rather than a linear relationship with its NPD performance, such that at low levels, learning patterns’ effects on new product performance are stronger, but at high levels, the effects grow weaker. Third, we find that the interaction between exploratory learning and exploitative learning negatively affects its NPD performance, which means the advantages of exploratory learning decrease as the level of exploitative learning increases while the advantages of exploratory learning become smaller as exploitative learning increases. Finally, the findings of our study have implications for managers. In China's technology- based firms, EO penetrates those businesses’ strategic decision-making process and guides them to selectively conduct exploratory learning and/or exploitative learning for NPD. The two learning patterns, acting as the key intermediate link between EO and NPD, should be well balanced to collaboratively and dynamically promote NPD.
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