Managing paradoxes of ambidexterity: The impact of exploration and exploitation on firm performance

This dissertation examines the impacts of exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity on firm performance in three essays. Since exploration and exploitation have their own advantages and disadvantages, there are many debates over their impacts on firm performance. To synthesize the conflicting empirical results, the first essay conducted a meta-analytic study and demonstrates that ambidexterity in the product domain increases firm performance while ambidexterity in the market domain does not significantly influence firm performance. In addition, the results show that it is not necessary for all firms (e.g., resource-constrained firms) to pursue ambidexterity. Thus, the second and third essays examine how to leverage exploration and exploitation among two types of resource-constrained firms: U.S.-based international small- and medium-sized enterprises (ISMEs) and emerging-market (EM) firms. In the second essay, I examined contingences of the impacts of exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity on performance of U.S.-based ISMEs. The results based on 119 ISMEs show that the impacts of exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity on firm performance depend on home-host country similarity and adaptive marketing capability. For instance, when ambitious ISMEs want to pursue ambidexterity, they should do so in a similar foreign country because home-host country similarity could mitigate the negative influence of ambidexterity on firm performance. In the third essay, I examined how relative-exploration orientation mobilizes EM firms’ acquired marketing resources from firms based in developed economies. The results show that brand resources integration increases post-merger performance when relative-exploration orientation is high, and market resources integration increases post-merger performance when relative-exploration orientation is low. The major contribution of this dissertation is enriching understandings of exploration and exploitation and provide relevant guidance for firms on selecting appropriate strategies to increase firm performance

The Role of IT Application Orchestration Capability in Improving Agility and Performance

This paper investigates how IT application orchestration – a dynamic capability encapsulating a firm’s ability to refresh its application portfolio through a process of building, buying, and retiring IT applications – impacts firm performance. We propose a conceptual model in which the effect of IT application orchestration on firm performance is mediated by process agility. We further propose that a firm’s strategic orientation moderates the effect of IT application orchestration capability on process agility. Analysis of data from an international survey of IT executives supports our proposed hypotheses. This research contributes to the emergent literature on dynamic capabilities by proposing and testing a theory of how IT application orchestration capability affects agility and firm performance

Distributed Ledger Technologies for Network Slicing: A Survey

Network slicing is one of the fundamental tenets of Fifth Generation (5G)/Sixth Generation (6G) networks. Deploying slices requires end-to-end (E2E) control of services and the underlying resources in a network substrate featuring an increasing number of stakeholders. Beyond the technical difficulties this entails, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that do not necessarily trust each other, which often requires costly manual processes, including the legal construction of neutral entities. In this context, Blockchain comes to the rescue by bringing its decentralized yet immutable and auditable lemdger, which has a high potential in the telco arena. In this sense, it may help to automate some of the above costly processes. There have been some proposals in this direction that are applied to various problems among different stakeholders. This paper aims at structuring this field of knowledge by, first, providing introductions to network slicing and blockchain technologies. Then, state-of-the-art is presented through a global architecture that aggregates the various proposals into a coherent whole while showing the motivation behind applying Blockchain and smart contracts to network slicing. And finally, some limitations of current work, future challenges and research directions are also presented.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Formación Personal Investigador (FPI) under Grant PRE2018-086061, in part by the TRUE5G under Grant PID2019-108713RB-C52/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and in part by the European Union (EU) H2020 The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5GPPP) 5Growth Project 856709.Publicad

Business model innovation: harnessing big data analytics and digital transformation in hostile environments

PurposeThe literature mainly concentrates on the relationships between externally oriented digital transformation (ExtDT), big data analytics capability (BDAC) and business model innovation (BMI) from an intra-organizational perspective. However, it is acknowledged that the external environment shapes the firm's strategy and affects innovation outcomes. Embracing an external environment perspective, the authors aim to fill this gap. The authors develop and test a moderated mediation model linking ExtDT to BMI. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities view, the authors' model posits that the effect of ExtDT on BMI is mediated by BDAC, while environmental hostility (EH) moderates these relationships.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt a quantitative approach based on bootstrapped partial least square-path modeling (PLS-PM) to analyze a sample of 200 Italian data-driven SMEs.FindingsThe results highlight that ExtDT and BDAC positively affect BMI. The findings also indicate that ExtDT is an antecedent of BMI that is less disruptive than BDAC. The authors also obtain that ExtDT solely does not lead to BDAC. Interestingly, the effect of BDAC on BMI increases when EH moderates the relationship.Originality/valueAnalyzing the relationships between ExtDT, BDAC and BMI from an external environment perspective is an underexplored area of research. The authors contribute to this topic by evaluating how EH interacts with ExtDT and BDAC toward BMI

Managing Ambidexterity in Startups Pursuing Digital Innovation

With the current pace of digital innovation, corporations and startups alike are experiencing the challenge of surviving in hypercompetitive environments. Accordingly, the management literature proposes “organizational ambidexterity”, the ability to balance exploitative and exploratory efforts, as a means of survival. Based on observations and interviews with startups and investors affiliated with the entrepreneurial educational program SCALEit, this study investigates how startups can manage ambidexterity in pursuing digital innovation. Our study concludes that startups conducting digital innovation manage to attain organizational ambidexterity through internal and external adaptation by combining and enacting competencies. The startups have access to a competency portfolio that comprises eight core competencies across organizational boundaries. The startup CEO, team members, and individuals in the ecosystem that surround the startup provide these competencies, which reveals a new perspective on how to achieve organizational ambidexterity through leveraging both internal and external competencies

Dynamic Alliance Capability As A Business Innovation Enabler Towards Sustained Economic Development: An Empirical Study Of Organizational Practices

Nowadays, increasing competition and rapidly changing market conditions are constantly affecting firms’ ability to sustain their businesses, and transforming to a more sustainable economic system is in extreme need. Although researchers have recognized the importance that firms need to become more sustainable, little attention is paid to the economic aspect. Meanwhile, despite a large number of start-up companies fail to survive, the extant literature mostly focuses on the corporate perspective or macro-economic level. To address challenges regarding sustained economic development, business model innovation appears to be superior to other types of innovation. Also, recognition has been given to paramount benefits that strategic alliances could deliver to a firm’s capabilities; however, much less effort is made to examine alliance capability under the dynamic capability approach as an enabler of business model innovation towards sustained economic development. This research responds to the call of having more studies on business model innovation towards sustained economic development from a dynamic capabilities approach in the context of start-up companies. It aims to shed light on the organizational practices and routines that contribute to the development of the dynamic alliance capability, and its relevance to the company’s effort in innovating the business model design to achieve sustained economic development goals. By disaggregating practices and routines that underpin this higher-order capability, the study offers an in-depth understanding of how the capability is practically built and exploited in start-up companies

The impact of intelligent cyber-physical systems on the decarbonization of energy

Assessing the impact of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, so-called intelligent cyber-physical systems, on emission reduction in the critical sector of energy provision.</p

Sustainable Value Co-Creation in Welfare Service Ecosystems : Transforming temporary collaboration projects into permanent resource integration

The aim of this paper is to discuss the unexploited forces of user-orientation and shared responsibility to promote sustainable value co-creation during service innovation projects in welfare service ecosystems. The framework is based on the theoretical field of public service logic (PSL) and our thesis is that service innovation seriously requires a user-oriented approach, and that such an approach enables resource integration based on the service-user’s needs and lifeworld. In our findings, we identify prerequisites and opportunities of collaborative service innovation projects in order to transform these projects into sustainable resource integration once they have ended