Contextual Ambidexterity: Tackling the Exploitation and Exploration Dilemma of Innovation Management in SMEs (original) (raw)
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Drivers of innovation ambidexterity in small- to medium-sized firms
European Management Journal, 2012
Balancing explorative and exploitative innovation ambidextrously has emerged as one of the foremost questions in management research. While a firmÕs ability to jointly pursue both exploitative and explorative innovation has been conceived as having positive performance effects, scholarly efforts to resolve the ambidexterity question have left a disproportionate gap in our understanding of how innovation ambidexterity can be achieved, particularly so in small-to-medium-sized firms (SMEs). The state of the debate is such that SMEs must largely rely on prescriptions tested with large firms to inform their ambidexterity initiatives. This study focuses on the characteristics of top managers and features of organizational structure and context in facilitating the appearance of ambidexterity in SMEs, and the mediation effect of innovation ambidexterity between structural, contextual, and leadership characteristics on SME performance. Results indicated that SMEs could achieve a close balance of explorative and exploitative innovations (BD) through shaping right international organizational structures and adopting appropriate leadership styles. Further, BD mediates the relationship between the structural, contextual, and leadership characteristics on SME performance. SMEs could benefit from BD with relatively resources available. ª
In search of balance Managing ambidexterity in a techno SME Bouten van der Duin Scholten Verburg
Managing the short term and the long term is crucial to the survival of companies. It can be done in different ways but it is more difficult for SMEs than for large companies, because, among other things, they have fewer tools at their disposal. For Ampelmann, the case we focus on in this study, at company level, only contextual and leadership-related ambidexterity are appropriate solutions. However, at project level, all five forms can be recognized and implemented to deal with exploration and exploitation. This means a shift in the discussion about ambidexterity in SMEs from company level toward project level. Furthermore, we found that, to manage the contradictory demands between exploration and exploitation, the explorative activities first need to be brought to a higher level, since innovation is divided among different units, and some components (e.g., project evaluation) are missing all together.
Organizational antecedents of exploration and exploitation in SMEs
European Business Review, 2020
PurposeScholars have recognized that formal hierarchical structures and slack resources are at the core of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) attainment of ambidexterity. Surprisingly, few studies on SMEs have analyzed the extent to which these structural and resource attributes are associated with exploration and exploitation. This study aims to examine how two structural attributes, formalization and structural empowerment, and two resource attributes, financial slack and human resource slack, affect exploration and exploitation in SMEs.Design/methodology/approachData were gathered from a survey administered to the chief executive officers of 522 French SMEs. The research hypotheses were then tested using seemingly unrelated regressions to investigate the contrasts between the two components of ambidexterity.FindingsThe results show that structural empowerment and financial slack may be conducive to exploration and exploitation at the same time. By contrast, formalization ...
Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2013
Some researchers have proposed that practices facilitating learning and knowledge transfer are particularly important to innovation. Some of the practices that researchers have studied include how organizations collaborate with other organizations, how organizations promote learning, and how an organization's culture facilitates knowledge transfer and learning. And while some have proposed the importance of combining practices, there has been a distinct lack of empirical studies that have explored how these practices work together to facilitate learning and knowledge transfer that leads to the simultaneous achievement of incremental and radical innovation, what we refer to as innovation ambidexterity (IA). Yet, a firm's ability to combine these practices into a learning capability is an important means of enabling them to foster innovation ambidexterity.
Organization Science, 2013
B alancing 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 strategic combinations of exploration and exploitation in both product and market domains. We test the hypotheses with a longitudinal study in a dynamic industry that combines objective measures of competition, firm size, age, and revenue performance with self-reported measures of product and market exploration and exploitation. The empirical results offer new insights with respect to several tensions at the heart of the ambidexterity challenge: (1) pure strategies that combine product exploration with market exploration or product exploitation with market exploitation have complementary interaction effects on revenue, (2) cross-functional ambidexterity combining product exploitation with market exploration also exerts complementary interaction effects on revenue, (3) product ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for older and larger-but not younger and smaller-firms, and (4) market ambidexterity has positive effects on revenue for larger-but not smaller, younger, or older-firms. Two ambidexterity paradoxes emerge: (1) larger, older firms have the resources, capabilities, and experience required to benefit from a product ambidexterity strategy, but larger, older firms are less likely to implement product ambidexterity; and (2) only larger firms have the resources and capabilities required to benefit from a market ambidexterity strategy, but developing and sustaining market ambidexterity is necessary to drive long-term growth.
Exploration and exploitation in product innovation
Industrial and Corporate Change, 2007
A central theoretical problem in organizational evolution is how organizations acquire new capabilities. Organizational exploitation of current capabilities often reduces exploration of new capabilities, resulting in a short-term bias in organizational adaptation . In addition, problemistic search and slack search have different consequences for exploration and exploitation because exploration has greater risk and less routinization. Exploration and exploitation are also affected by organizational momentum (Kelly and Amburgey, 1991) and direct competition from exploitation to exploration ). These propositions are tested using data on innovations in shipbuilding between 1972 and 2000.
International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 2012
This paper o®ers a model for e®ectively managing ambiguity at the fuzzy front end of innovation projects. We conducted in-depth studies of four new product development projects from the medical device industry. Through the abductive process of iterative grounded theory we built a model of the management of ambiguity. The model we propose shows that innovation teams that have a higher tolerance for ambiguity are better able to exploit it. The successful management of ambiguity in innovation projects rests upon the balancing of opposing needs.