Impact of IT Intellectual Capital on IT Explorative-Exploitative Innovation Strategy and Performance

In turbulent business environments, firms are increasingly relying on information technology (IT) to enhance their agility to meet multiple market demands. IT departments then play an important role in maintaining an appropriate balance between explorative and exploitative IT innovation strategies to enable the agility. This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literatures by gaining a broader understanding of how the intellectual capital of IT departments can influence the IT explorative-exploitative innovation strategies, and the impact of these strategies on organizational performance. The empirical data collected from 122 IT managers in Taiwan´s manufacturing firms show that human capital positively affects the two innovation strategies, structural capital has significant positive effect only on explorative innovation strategy, relational capital has positive moderating effect on the relationship between human capital and explorative innovation strategy, and both the two innovation strategies positively influence the IT department performance, which in turn facilitates the organization performance.