Entrepreneurial Discovery and Complexity: an Experimental Approach to the Exploitation/Exploration Dilemma

Management literature has lately studied how technological and organizational constraints hinder entrepreneurial ability in alertly selecting/exploiting new opportunities. The paper aims at showing that entrepreneurial alertness is shaped on the complexity of the environment. We build an experiment to measure alertness and its relations with opportunity appearances, entrepreneurial effort and complexity of the production structure. We show that alertness actually increases with the selection of more opportunities, but not with the complexity of the environment itself, while the entrepreneurial effort rate reduces the alertness significantly more when participants are in a complex environment.