Balancing exploration and exploitation is a critical challenge that is particularly difficult for smaller, nascent organizations that lack the resources, capabilities, and experience necessary to successfully implement ambidexterity. To better understand how small and medium-sized enterprises achieve ambidexterity, we develop theoretical arguments that link organizational performance to strateg...

Previous research focuses on firm and business unit level ambidexterity. Therefore, conceptual and empirically validated understanding about ambidexterity at the individual level of analysis is very scarce. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by investigating managers’ ambidexterity, delivering three contributions to theory and empirical research on ambidexterity. First, by proposin...

Because it is difficult and costly for firms to practice exploration and exploitation simultaneously in their new product development, managers need to know when investing in ambidexterity is beneficial for their firm’s innovativeness and when it is not. To date, research has remained undecided about the performance implications of striving for the joint implementation of exploration and exploi...

What are the relevant management challenges for open innovation, and how do companies tackle these challenges? This study adds to the research of open innovation management by investigating different management dimensions and their inherent dilemmas. By applying the concept of organizational ambidexterity as an approach to pursue apparently conflicting objectives, we extend previous research in...

Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through differentiation or through integration? Does ambidexterity occur at the individual or organizational level? Must organizations take a static or dyn...

“Organizational ambidexterity” has become an emerging research trend in both the organizational management and knowledge management field (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; He & Wong, 2004). The central theme on organizational ambidexterity is about organizational capability to simultaneously deal with paradoxical or conflicting activities such as organizational alignment and adaptation; evolutionary ...

In this paper, we investigate the notion of organizational ambidexterity in using interorganizational system (IOS) in supply chain context. IOS ambidexterity is defined as a firm’s capability of simultaneously pursuing exploratory and exploitative use of IOS. In order to understand the implication of IOS ambidexterity in IT resource-constrained firms, this paper draws on theories in resource-ba...

This study looks at how performance measurement can be used to drive simultaneously exploitative and explorative behaviors, and impact company performance. In doing so, this research considers performance measurement as an important, but neglected antecedent of organizational ambidexterity, and adds to existing evidence on the impact of organizational ambidexterity on firm financial and non-fin...

Organizational ambidexterity still remains ambiguous in terms of the concept and vague in terms of feasible realizations, especially for SMEs. We analyze recent classifications of the concept and focus on cyclical ambidexterity as the appropriate means for SMEs to manage the tension between incremental and discontinuous innovation effectively. We argue that cyclical ambidexterity should be unde...

In seeking answer to the question what role can IT based knowledge Capability play in commercialization of innovation, we looked at potential and realized absorptive capacity and ambidexterity . We posit that a firm's absorptive capacity and ambidexterity (ability to explore and exploit) affect its ability to commercialize innovations. Further, absorptive capacity too can be an antecedent to am...