Drivers of innovation ambidexterity in small- to medium-sized firms
By Yi‐Ying Chang, Mathew Hughes. 2012
346 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Balancing explorative and exploitative innovation ambidextrously has emerged as one of the foremost questions in management research. While a firm’s ability to jointly pursue both exploitative and explorative innovation has been conceived as having positive performance effects, scholarly efforts to resolve the ambidexterity question have left a disproportionate gap in our understanding of how innovation ambidexterity can be achieved, particularly so in small-to-medium-sized firms (SMEs). The state of the debate is such that SMEs must largely rely on prescriptions tested with large firms to inform their ambidexterity initiatives. This study focuses on the characteristics of top managers and features of organizational structure and context in facilitating the appearance of ambidexterity in SMEs, and the mediation effect of innovation ambidexterity between structural, contextual, and leadership characteristics on SME performance. Results indicated that SMEs could achieve a close balance of explorative and exploitative innovations (BD) through shaping right international organizational structures and adopting appropriate leadership styles. Further, BD mediates the relationship between the structural, contextual, and leadership characteristics on SME performance. SMEs could benefit from BD with relatively resources available.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7399317b7ab1a42121605ef9e25b6bf3585ff50c
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In Management of Technology and Innovation
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Leading innovation: Empirical evidence for ambidextrous leadership from UK high-tech SMEs (2020, background): “Yet, the prescriptions from larger firms may be unsuitable for SMEs as it is well established that SMEs differ significantly from large firms as they tend to have limited human resources, limited financial resources, and limited managerial expertise (Cao, Gedajlovic and Zhang, 2009; Chang and Hughes”
- The individual side of ambidexterity: Do individuals' perceptions match actual behaviors in reconciling the exploration and exploitation trade-off? (2014, background): “Empirical research has found support for the positive effect of the balance between these two learning orientation both on innovation output and on firm performance (e.g. Chang & Hughes, 2012; Danneels, 2002; Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996).”