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Ties with government, strategic capability, and organizational ambidexterity: evidence from China’s information communication technology industry

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Abstract

Organizations that are capable of pursuing exploration and exploitative innovation strategies simultaneously have demonstrated superior performance. For information and communication technology (ICT) firms, it is especially critical to achieve such organizational ambidexterity in order to both allocate limited resources and pursue different innovation strategies appropriately. As the ICT industry in China faces higher environmental uncertainty, a less developed institutional framework, and increased power of market competition, we explore the antecedents of ambidexterity conjointly, considering the effects of institutions and organizational capabilities. Building on ambidexterity literature, we develop a capability-building framework to explore firms’ strategic choice-making between exploratory innovation strategy versus exploitation innovation strategy, and their orientation to pursuit one, or both. With survey data from China’s ICT industry, we find that ties with government promote an ambidextrous focus on both types of innovation strategies. In addition, we find that strategic capability partially mediates the main effects of ties with government on both exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies. Implications for organizational ambidexterity in China’s ICT industry are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

The research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71102030), the National Social Science Foundation of China (11&ZD035), Shanghai First-class Key Discipline (B), and the Project of ‘Social Development of Metropolis and Construction of Smart City’ (085SHDX001). We would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments and constructive suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China

    Xiaoyu Yu & Yi Chen

  2. School of Business, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Bang Nguyen

  3. School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China

    Wenhong Zhang

Authors
  1. Xiaoyu Yu
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  2. Yi Chen
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  3. Bang Nguyen
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  4. Wenhong Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bang Nguyen.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 Measurement items and validity assessment
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Yu, X., Chen, Y., Nguyen, B. et al. Ties with government, strategic capability, and organizational ambidexterity: evidence from China’s information communication technology industry. Inf Technol Manag 15, 81–98 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-014-0175-3

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