Double ambidexterity: How a Telco incumbent used business‐model and technology innovations to successfully respond to three major disruptions

Abstract

We leverage the business model innovation and ambidexterity literature to investigate a contradictory case, the Swedish-Finnish Telecom operator TeliaSonera. Despite being challenged by three major disruptions, the company not only still exists but also enjoys remarkably good financial performance. Building on extant archival data and interviews, we carefully identify and map 26 organizational responses during 1992-2016. We find that the firm has overcome three critical phases by experimenting and pioneering with portfolios of business models and/or technological innovations.We describe this behaviour as double ambidexterity. We use an in-depth case study to conceptualize double ambidexterity and discuss its impact on the business's survival and enduring success. | INTRODUCTIONOne stream of business model research has addressed the relationship between technological innovation (TI) and business model innovations (BMI) (Baden-Fuller & Haefliger, 2013;Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002;Tongur & Engwall, 2014). This stream of inquiry has its roots in the 1970s, although it only gained momentum when existing theories were unable to explain new phenomena emerging from Internetbased companies (Wirtz, Pistoia, Ullrich, & Gottel, 2016). During this time, companies such as Google were unable to capture the value from their search customers directly. Instead, they had to capture the value created from a second group of customers: companies seeking to advertise to the first customer group (Teece, 2010). These early arti- Baden-Fuller and Haefliger (2013) suggest that the relationship between BMI and TI is bidirectional. While they agree that business models mediate the relationship between TI and firm performance (or value capture), they also emphasize that BMI-with open business models, in particular-is able to boost the ability to develop the right technology. In a similar vein, Tongur and Engwall (2014) argue that BMI is necessary to manage technology shifts and that the management of technology shifts is a process of managing both TI and BMI.Furthermore, the study of business models has also been conducted on different levels of analysis, and Wirtz et al. (2016) show that it has moved from the product level to the level of business units and organizations. Studies on the organizational level have also looked into the role of TI and BMI in transforming industries, such as newspapers (Holm, Gunzel, & Ulhøi, 2013;Rohrbeck, Günzel, & Uliyanova, 2012) or electric mobility (Abdelkafi, Makhotin, & Posselt, 2013). Thus, the question of how TI and BMI interplay has implications not only for the management of firms but also for the dynamic of industry transformation (Bidmon & Knab, 2014).Through our study, we want to contribute to the academic debate on BMI and the long-term performance of firms, taking into account the dynamic interplay of TI and BMI over time (Achtenhagen, Melin, & Naldi, 2013;Amit & Zott, 2012;Baden-Fuller & Haefliger, 2013;Björkdahl, 2009;Cavalcante, Kesting, & Ulhøi, 2011).For our study, we sought an industry t...

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