The importance of external knowledge acquisition for innovation by firms is well established. In particular, there has been an increasing focus on the two distinct modes of firms’ external search strategies, which have a differential effect on their learning and innovation: search breadth and depth. By applying organizational ambidexterity lens, we hypothesize that pursuing high levels of both external search strategies is beneficial to achieve a balance between exploitative and explorative innovation, which, in turn, has a positive impact on the firm’s innovation performance. We also hypothesize that, even among the firms that maintain high levels of both search strategies, firms with higher absorptive capacity better achieve a balance between both modes of innovation, thereby producing higher performance. The findings on a multi-industry sample of Koran manufacturing firms confirm our hypotheses and imply that it is essential for firms to develop capabilities for different modes of external search activities in conjunction with internal absorptive capacity for superior innovation performance.

Although user innovation has been regarded as an important source of firms’ competitive advantage, the internal processes and mechanisms involved in the relationship between firms’ user innovation activities and market performance are seldom studied. By applying moderated mediation analyses, we examine (1) whether firms’ user innovation activities have a positive impact on market performance and (2) how and under what conditions user innovation activities can have a positive impact on a firm’s market performance. The findings on a sample of Korean manufacturing firms indicate that user innovation activities significantly increase firms’ innovation performance, which consequently leads to superior market performance (confirming the mediation effect of innovation performance). Additionally, we observe the positive mediation effect of innovation performance only in firms with higher levels of absorptive capacity (confirming the moderated mediation effect of absorptive capacity). Further analysis confirms that the positive interaction effects between user innovation activities and absorptive capacity on market performance through innovation performance were more pronounced for firms with higher Chief Executive Officer (CEO) shareholding levels (confirming the moderated mediation effect of CEO’s shareholding). Our findings provide theoretical and practical implications on the successful implementation of user innovation strategies.