Achieving ambidexterity through balancing exploration and exploitation with interorganizational collaboration

There has been argument regarding the issues that firms need to balance exploration and exploitation in order to achieve superior performance. This study examines which leads to better performance to balance exploration and exploitation or to emphasize one of them. Also, this study scrutinizes how different types of interorganizational collaboration affect firm performance according to firm´s strategic orientation. To test the hypothesis, this study analyzes data on Korean manufacturing firms collected in the Korean Innovation Survey. The result shows that strategic orientation which refers to firm´s orientation from exploitation to exploration has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm performance. This relationship is negatively moderated by explorative collaboration. These findings suggest that balancing exploration and exploitation is beneficial for firm performance and explorative collaboration is more helpful for firms weighted toward exploitation.