• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.205-244
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• 2015

In response to the recent rapid technological and market changes, the importance of the design of ambidextrous organization has been increasingly emphasized as one of the dynamic capabilities. Firms that show a high performance in the rapid technological and market changes appear to design and implement ambidextrous organization successfully. They have achieved both exploitative competence for continuous innovation with product development and exploratory competence for discontinuous innovation with new market and new technologies. We have examined why and how to design and operate ambidextrous organizations and the effects of ambidextrous organizational characteristics on the performance from structural, contextual and leadership perspectives. We conducted case studies on 3 Korean firms that showed different characteristics of industrial product, company size, etc. Longitudinal case studies exhibit different processes of design and operating ambidextrous organization according to innovative strategy and industrial characteristics.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.27-43
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• 2020

Recently, there has been growing interest in entrepreneurial universities. Accordingly, this study discussed the paradigm shift from traditional university roles to entrepreneurial universities and conducted case analysis of Oxford University, Stanford University and Berlin Institute of Technology from the perspective of ambidextrous strategies of universities. Universities are emphasizing the importance of academic capitalism through market activities as well as the educational and research-oriented role to adapt and survive the rapidly changing uncertain environment. Therefore, many studies related to this have been conducted. This paper discusses the background and necessity of the transformation from traditional universities to entrepreneurial universities, and applies the case of a university that has been successful in transforming into an entrepreneurial universities and creating excellent outcome in terms of ambidextrous strategy. Specifically, this study examined the structural, contextual, and leadership perspectives as a antecedents for ambidextrous strategy. This paper expects not only to introduce cases but also to be used as reference for adapting to future paradigm shifts to entrepreneurial universities and setting the direction of universities.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.17-36
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• 2012

With wide recognition of significant roles of venture companies in economic and industrial developments, substantial academic attention has been paid to understanding venture success and numerous policy measures have been made to help them. A serious problem, however, is that only a few limited number of venture could successfully grow to be large firm. The goal of this paper is to identify critical factors to drive 'leapfrogging' growth of venture companies by analyzing the success cases in Daejeon area. The theoretical analysis and case study suggest 1) founders' entrepreneurship continuity as a significant internal organization factor for growth and highlight importance of 2) exploring foreign markets and globalization of business operation in the early stage of growth. Furthermore, the research results identify two critical innovation strategies, 3) ambidextrous R&D strategy and 4) open innovation strategy, for entrepreneurial founders to effectively catch the business chances brought by environment change.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.17-43
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• 2012

Alliance formation has been recognized as an important strategy for firms who seek to survive through acquisition of sustainable competitive advantages. Specifically in high-tech industries, firms may consider formation of strategic alliances in order to access valuable external knowledge. These firms tend to be situated in a dilemma that they should choose between exploration and exploitation, which are two types of strategic choices suggested by March (1991). Working out the dilemma has been extensively discussed in the area of strategy or organization learning. Recently, however, an increasing number of studies have stressed on a balance between exploration and exploitation. Regarded as 'ambidextrous organizations' (Lavie and Rosenkopf, 2006), these firms that simultaneously pursue exploration and exploitation have emerged in high-tech industries, and many studies have provided evidence of positive association between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance. In the strategic alliance research, accordingly, scholars began to pay attention to the balanced choice between exploration-and exploitation-oriented alliances. Given these backgrounds, this study examines the relationship between alliance ambidexterity and firm performance. While previous research approached alliance ambidexterity mainly from the number of alliances, our study suggests ambidexterity in terms of alliance portfolio and alliance partner. Our dataset consists of biotechnology or pharmaceutical firms in the United States, which spans time period between 1990 and 2005. We conduct panel data analysis. The results show the strong link between alliance ambidexterity and firm performance, highlighting the balance between exploration and exploitation when firms make strategic decisions.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.131-144
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• 2021

The organizational ambidexterity is an organizational strategy designed to pursue exploration activities to seize new opportunities and exploitation activities to efficiently use resources. Most of these ambidextrous structures have been studied for large corporations with slack resources, and there are still not many studies on the necessity of an ambidextrous structure for startups with relatively low-level resources. However, recently, the startup ecosystem is being advanced globally, and the amount of VC investment is rapidly increasing. This is a time when a lot of venture fund is invested in startups and a startup-friendly environment for rapid growth is created. This is the time to discuss the necessity and applicability of an ambidextrous organizational structure for startups. Therefore, this study conducted a hypothesis test whether the importance and necessity of balance that startups solving market problems with new ideas and utilizing accumulated resources have. To conduct this study, we analyzed 140 startups data gathered from the survey and the moderation effect was also analyzed. As a result of the study, it was verified that the balance of startup exploration and exploitation had a significant effect on startup performance, and the moderating effect of environmental dynamics was found to have a significant effect on the relationship with non-financial performance. Therefore, for startups with insufficient resources, it was concluded that the surplus resources generated in the process of a firm's growth should be effectively utilized and the balance between exploration and exploitation should be balanced from the initial stage of searching for a new business. In other words, it was confirmed that it is important for continuous growth and survival to seek the structure of an ambidextrous organization in order to internalize a mechanism that enables startups to pursue both effectiveness and efficiency in the long term. This study suggests a strategic direction for the growth of startups from the perspective of organizational structure. We expect that this meaningful results on the relationship between the ambidextrous capabilities of startups and performance contribute to the growth of startups in the rapidly growing startup venture environment.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.13-23
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• 2019

Purpose - Corporate activities for enhancing and improving corporate performance can largely be divided into exploration and exploitation. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of implementing organizational ambidexterity in SMEs, including distribution firms, by reviewing the extant literature and deriving the basis on which this strategy affects the managerial performance. Research, design, and methodology - The study uses a systematic review methodology, which employs a structured process to discern trends and meaningful themes across a wide body of literature on specific subjects and research questions. This qualitative study examined the influence of ambidextrous strategies of SMEs on firm performance, and the results were synthesized from the literature. Results - Organizational ambidexterity in SMEs is related to the firm's managerial performance. However, it is crucial to know that there are many ways to generate an ambidextrous organization, and decisions about what method to choose should be based on the environmental aspects of the enterprise. Conclusions - The following aspects should be considered for execution; : making practical decisions based on accurate information about the resources the firm has, considering the organizational level of human resources for implementing organizational ambidexterity, and sharing specific performance goals.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.107-122
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• 2020

Purpose - This paper investigates the relations among exploratory and exploitative supply chain management practices, competitive advantage, and firm performance. Design/methodology/approach - This study takes a hypothesis-generating study to capture the tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation and develops some hypotheses which involve the relations among SCM practices, competitive advantage, and short-term and long-term performance. Findings - Exploitative SCM practices have more positive effects on short-term performance rather than long-term performance, whereas exploratory SCM activities affect long-term performance. Further competitive strategy, environmental dynamism, and organizational slack moderates the relationship between SCM and performance. Exploitative SCM is more desirable when a firm uses low cost strategy, lacks slack resources, and faces stable environment, while exploratory SCM is more effective when a firm employs differentiation strategy, has slack resources, and confront dynamic environment. Research implications or Originality - In order to understand the performance effects of a variety of SCM practices, we should distinguish between exploitative and exploratory SCM activities. Further the relationship between SCM and performance may differ depending upon some contingent variables such as external environment, competitive strategy and organizational slack.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.83-126
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• 2023

The revenue histogram of venture businesses is shifting from bell-shaped normal distribution to power-law distribution, which implies that the fitness landscape of the venture businesses ecosystem is changing to be more rugged terrain. We argue that the firm should adopt both exploitation (fast follower) and exploration (or first mover) strategies not to get stuck in local maxima in the rugged fitness landscape from the complex system perspective. By designing and performing agent-based modeling simulation experiments which consist of three types of agents (new technologies, entrepreneurs, and consumers), we demonstrated that the ambidexterity strategy showed the highest performance score in three of four different environment except 'Fast Widening' case where the exploitation strategy showed the highest performance score under low technology appropriation and fast disruptive technology development speed. By investigating the financial and other statistics of 617 top venture businesses who have earned 100B won or higher annual revenue, we concluded that 82% and 9% of firms are bent on the exploitation and exploration strategy.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.299-321
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• 2016

Previous studies on strategic alliance formation have largely overlooked the effects that organizations' routine development can have on the relationship between organizations' network position and their alliance ambidexterity strategy. This study extends ambidexterity research by adding internal and network perspectives and examining their cumulative effects on alliance ambidexterity. We first acknowledge the interplay between organizations' internal knowledge exploration/exploitation strategies and organizations' alliance ambidexterity and determine that organizations with a high level of internal knowledge breadth are more likely to make focused alliance decisions. Second, our analysis of 145 US-based information technology organizations with an active alliance behavior reveals that having well-formed routines as a result of previous collaborations strengthens the tendency of brokerage organizations to follow alliances that focus on either exploration or exploitation. Although most alliance studies have commonly argued in favor of an ambidextrous approach, this study provides critical evidence that both internal knowledge exploration/exploitation strategies and development of routines constrain organizations' alliance formation decisions, guiding them towards a more focused approach.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.173-187
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• 2018

After Satoshi Nakamoto published 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system' in 2008, Blockchain has been GPT (General Purpose Technologies) that affect the whole cycle of the $4^{th}$ Industrial Revolution. This study attempted to identify the innovativeness of Blockchain. Because of Blockchain's ambidextrous characteristics, Blockchain has two kinds of innovativeness, technological innovation by physical technology and social innovation by social technology. Thus, this study will be useful to increase understanding and establishing strategy for Blockchain.