A multistate modeling approach for organizational cybersecurity exploration and exploitation

Highlights：

• Organizational cybersecurity relies on the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation

• A framework was proposed for studying exploration and exploitation in the organizational learning process

• Four states are identified to describe the dynamics of exploration and exploitation in organizational cybersecurity space.

• Text Analytics was applied to annual report data to create longitudinal exploration and exploitation variables.

• A Markov chain was proposed to model transitions between different states of organizational exploration and exploitation.