Organizing for Innovation Ambidexterity in Emerging Markets: Taking Advantage of Supplier Involvement and Foreignness

Firms struggle to be ambidextrous in the sense of being able to successfully manage both new and incremental innovation activities simultaneously. Applying the knowledge-based view, we examine the important moderating influences of supplier involvement and foreignness on the relationship between innovation ambidexterity and performance. We test our hypotheses at the business-unit level of analysis in the emerging market of Brazil. We examine two types of innovation ambidexterity: the balanced dimension and the combined dimension. We found that firms possessing greater supplier involvement reap higher performance benefits from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity. Last, foreign subsidiaries also achieved higher levels of performance than domestic firms from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity.