Exploitation vs. Exploration: Balancing Short and Long Term Strategies

Join this session of the Willard W. Brown Webinar Series featuring Tawfik Jelassi, professor of strategy and technology management, IMD Business School, Lausanne, Switzerland, and moderated by Nizar Becheikh, associate professor of strategy and innovation management. The webinar will address how to find the right balance between the short and long-term balance needed to enable companies to continue to thrive in an increasingly changing and digitally-impacted business environment. It will also discuss the corporate culture and organizational capabilities required to achieve successful exploitation and exploration.

Significantly few companies can excel at innovation and execution simultaneously and renew themselves in reaction to (or in anticipation of) disruption in their business context. In this webinar, the speaker presents possible approaches to simultaneously achieving exploration (new ideas) and exploitation (efficiency) to help organizations succeed over time.

About the speaker:
Tawfik Jelassi is a professor of strategy and technology management at IMD Business School, Lausanne (Switzerland), and co-director of the “Orchestrating Winning Performance” program, IMD’s most extensive executive education program attracting 600 participants per year. Before that, he was Minister of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies in the transition-to-democracy government of Tunisia. From 2000 to 2013, Jelassi was professor and dean of the Business School at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. He was also chairman of the Board of Directors of Ooredoo Tunisia (the leading mobile telecom operator in the country) and previously, associate professor and coordinator of the Technology Management Department at INSEAD in Fontainebleau France.
Jelassi holds a Ph.D. degree from the Stern School of Business at New York University. His research focuses on digital transformation and leadership in turbulent times. His seven books have appeared, the latest of which is entitled “Strategies for e-Business: Concepts and Cases on Value Creation and Digital Business Transformation” (4th edition, Springer Publishing, 2020). He has also published over ninety research articles in refereed academic journals and conference proceedings. Professor Jelassi taught extensively in MBA, EMBA and executive education programs in over a dozen countries worldwide. For his academic work, he was granted several research and teaching excellence awards. Furthermore, the President of Tunisia awarded him two national decorations: the “Order of the Republic” and the “Order of merit in the fields of education and science.”

About the moderator:
Nizar Becheikh received a Bachelor's of Business Administration in International Business from Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Tunis, Tunisia. He earned an MBA in international management and a Ph.D. in business administration from Laval University, Canada. During his time in Canada, Becheikh worked closely, as part of R&D and consulting projects, with managers and policymakers from several Canadian SMEs, public organizations and governmental agencies intended to foster innovation and regional economic development in Canada. He published his research in top-tier academic journals and prestigious conferences such as Technovation, the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, the Academy of Management meeting, the International Association for Management of Technology (IAMOT) and the Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics (DRUID).
Upon joining The American University in Cairo in 2011, Becheikh served as an advisor to the MBA programs’ director. In 2012, he was appointed associate chair of the Department of Management, and since 2013 he has been acting as associate dean for Graduate Studies and Research. During his tenure as associate dean, Becheikh reshaped the research environment in the School of Business by adopting a proactive research strategy that led to a significant increase in both the volume and the quality of publications. The external research funding has also tremendously increased to cross in 2016, for the first time in the history of the School of Business, the level of $1 million. Becheikh has also contributed to several major initiatives such as the AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA accreditations and the development of the School of Business
strategic plan 2015-2019. Becheikh teaches strategy, innovation management and entrepreneurship at the undergraduate and the executive MBA programs. His current research interests focus on (open) innovation in manufacturing and service sectors, (open) innovation paths and best practices in LDCs, entrepreneurship in developing countries and managing growth and innovation in SMEs.

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