Ambidextrous Marketing Capabilities, Exploratory and Exploitative Market-Based Innovation, and Innovation Performance: An Empirical Study on China’s Manufacturing Sector

Despite the acknowledged importance of innovation for enterprises’ sustainable development, in comparison to technological innovation, research on market-based is still its nascent stage. It unclear what factors will predict and how boosts performance. Therefore, based an adaptive marketing capabilities perspective drawing insights from organizational ambidexterity literature, this study explored relationships among capabilities, Data collected 237 manufacturing enterprises China were analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis bootstrapping methods. The results showed that: (1) Marketing activities are both ambidextrous. Specifically, include exploration exploitation includes exploratory exploitative innovation. (2) Ambidextrous can enhance performance significantly, with ambidextrous playing a partial mediating role relationship. affect through whereas (3) Exploratory negatively moderates relationship between performance, also exerts negative moderating effect innovation–innovation association. These findings complement enrich capability (innovation) theory, helping better understand deploy ambidexterity, hence achieve sustainability.