Ambidextrous Innovation Capabilities, Antecedents and Performance

R&D intensive firms have faced many kinds of innovation dilemmas which firms have to develop both radical innovation to tap new opportunities and incremental innovation to enhance existing capabilities. The designed organizational structure allows to excel at both conflicting modes of innovation can be termed as organizational ambidexterity. However, how R&D intensive firms deal with various kinds of innovation dilemmas strategically still remain understudied. Based on the schools of organizational learning, strategic management, organizational design, and innovation studies, the study develops a notion of ambidextrous innovation capabilities (AIC) and AIC scale. AIC is formed by three dimensions: commitment, searching, learning and structure ambidexterity. And elaborates antecedents into three dimensions: corporate entrepreneurship, creative support and contingency reward. This paper proposes two hypotheses addressing the relationships between AIC and performance, antecedents and AIC. The survey generated 718 usable questionnaires responses in 68 BUs from 32 firms. The results show that AIC is positively associated with performance and antecedents are positively associated with AIC. In the future work, the paper concludes that the development of AIC could overcome innovation dilemmas, in turn enhance the performance. Firms could apply the proposed instrument to diagnose the condition of AIC in order to achieve higher performance.