The management of organizational ambidexterity through alliances in a new context of analysis: Internet of Things (IoT) smart city projects

By Stefano Bresciani, Alberto Ferraris, M. del Giudice. Technological forecasting & social change, 2017

393 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the last decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has affected the approach of organizations to innovation and how they create and capture value in everyday business activities. This is compounded in the so-called Smart Cities, where the objective of the IoT is to exploit information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support added-value services for citizens, giving companies more opportunities to innovate through the use of the latest technologies. In this context, multinational enterprises (MNEs) are building alliances, starting several projects with public and private city stakeholders aimed at exploring new technologies for cities but also at exploiting new IoT-based devices and services in order to profit from them. This implies that companies need to manage and integrate different types of knowledge to efficiently and effectively support the simultaneous pressure of exploration and exploitation, at a project portfolio level. Using structural equations modeling with data collected from 43 IoT smart city project alliances in Italy, this paper tests and finds evidence that MNEs need to develop knowledge management (KM) capabilities combined with ICT capabilities if they want to obtain greater ambidexterity performance at the project portfolio level. More specifically, we highlight that KM capabilities enhance alliance ambidexterity indirectly through firms' ICT capabilities, suggesting that MNE managers should design KM tools and develop new ICT skills. Implications for academics, managers and future lines of research are proposed.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Media Technology, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/147568f5a3f99a9267bbc2d7bd6810f87406f167

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Citations in the corpus

How can SMEs successfully navigate VUCA environment: The role of agility in the digital transformation era (2022, background): “Current digital technologies (Bresciani et al., 2018) seem to have a higher level of flexibility and accessibility which could make them useful tools for small and medium sized businesses (Goswami and Kumar, 2018; Škare and Soriano, 2021).”
The role of digital innovation in knowledge management systems: A systematic literature review (2021, background): “IoT tools, in particular, contain vast amounts of data and simplify the ways of identifying exploitable knowledge along the entire organizational chain (Bresciani et al., 2018; Del Giudice & Della Peruta, 2016; Ferraris et al., 2019; Tian, 2017).”
Digital transformation as a springboard for product, process and business model innovation (2021, background): “…is changing the way companies run businesses, and develop relationships within and across ecosystems (e.g. with consumers, suppliers, universities), posing new managerial opportunities and challenges (Bresciani, Ferraris, & Del Giudice, 2018; Verma, Gus-tafsson, Kristensson, & Witell, 2012).”
Ambidexterity and organizational learning: revisiting and reconnecting the literatures (2019, background): “Another important perspective related to the organizational ambidexterity literature is the strong intrafirm bias (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2013; Bresciani et al., 2018).”
Digitalization and business models: Where are we going? A science map of the field (2021, background): “In recent years, the trend has been spurred on by the introduction of new innovations, such as the Internet of Things (IoTs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Bresciani, Ferraris, & Del Giudice, 2018; Caputo, Marzi, & Pellegrini, 2016; Snabe Hagemann & Weinelt, 2016).”