Although organizational ambidexterity has gained momentum in recent innovation research, previous literature still offers a confusing and partial picture about how to leverage ambidexterity for new product development because of two limitations. First, previous research mainly focuses on static resource endowment and thus offers little insight about how firms should dynamically reconfigure resource portfolios to leverage organizational ambidexterity. Second, conceptual confusion on the notion of the balance dimension of organization ambidexterity still exists.
This study seeks to explore how firms should dynamically reconfigure resource portfolios to leverage organizational ambidexterity for new product development and to bring greater conceptual clarity to the notion of balance. By extending the static resource assumption, which is central to the extant debate in organizational ambidexterity literature, this research unpacks ambidexterity into a relative exploratory dimension and an interactive dimension. We further investigated the moderating effect of resource flexibility and coordination flexibility on the impacts of the two dimensions on new product development performance.
Based on the dynamic resource management view and organizational learning theory, we proposed six hypotheses and collected data from 213 firms through a survey to examine the hypotheses. Our results indicate that relative exploratory dimension and interactive dimension have different effects on new product development. Specifically, the relative exploratory dimension has an inverse U‐shaped effect on new product development while the interactive dimension has a positive effect. Furthermore, we find that resource flexibility and coordination flexibility have positive moderating effects on the relationships between the two dimensions of ambidexterity and new product development performance. Our study contributes to the ambidexterity research in three ways. First, from a dynamic resource management view, this study extends previous ambidexterity research from a static view to a dynamic view by exploring the moderating effects of resource flexibility and coordination flexibility. Second, we extend the understanding on ambidexterity by bringing greater conceptual clarity to the notion of balance. Third, this research provides new evidence on the effects of ambidextrous learning on new product development performance in transition economy such as China, where ambidextrous learning is crucial for firms to adapt to a dynamic environment.
From the perspective of the vendors in emerging countries (VECs), this article investigates how the vendor firms in China respond to cross-border outsourcing trends differently by examining the different effects of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and market orientation (MO), as well as their interaction, on local vendors' acquisition of knowledge from foreign outsourcers in cross-border outsourcing. We find that the knowledge acquisition of the vendors positively affects firm performance. Thus, the vendors need to correctly choose their strategic orientation to improve the knowledge acquisitions. Our results show the EO of the vendors has a positive effect on the knowledge acquisition, but the relationship between MO and the knowledge acquisition is an inverted U-shape. Further, the interactive effect between EO and MO on the knowledge acquisition is positive. All these findings extend the literature in organizational learning and cross-border outsourcing, and suggest that VECs should not only correctly choose their strategic orientation, but also pay more attention to the orientation interaction in acquiring knowledge from their partners through cross-border outsourcing so that they can more efficiently improve their performance. Copyright (c) 2010 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies.
How does technological innovation fit with business model design to jointly impact firm growth? Given the increasingly salient role of business model, extant literature provides little answer to this question. This study builds a theoretical model based on technological innovation literature, business ecosystem theory, and business model literature to investigate this issue. This study finds that exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation fit with different business model designs to promote firm growth. Six hypotheses are proposed and examined by a database from 176 Chinese firms. This research finds that exploitative innovation has a negative whereas exploratory innovation has a positive effect on firm growth. More importantly, we find that efficiency‐centered business model design enhances the negative effect of exploitative innovation and weakens the positive effect of exploratory innovation. We also find that novelty‐centered business model design weakens the negative effect of exploitative innovation. This research contributes to both technological innovation and business model design literature.
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