Managing ambidextrous innovation in ICT-based processes

In today’s competitive business environment, innovation is increasingly recognized as a powerful source of competitive advantage (Dyer and Singh, 1998; Loof and Heshmati, 2006). From an organizational point of view, recent literature on innovation includes valuable contributions on the creation and management of novelty in successful firms, focusing specifically on the effects of organizational design practices and behaviours on their dynamics (Roberts, 2007). Specifically, the ICT-based innovation represents more and more an interesting context of study because of the opportunities of change related to the use of ICTs in the workplace. For these reasons, managers as well as social scholars are looking at the topic for understanding the dynamics of developing, adopting, and using ICT innovations and their social constructions in organizational contexts (Jackson et al, 2004). In the broad topic of ICT innovation, our recent studies focus on the dynamics of organizing innovation, in terms of processes, competences, as well as mechanism that encourage the development of innovation and its distribution. Specifically, we are interested to understand the extend of which organizations can be ambidextrous, that is can manage simultaneously two forms of conflicting innovations: “the ability to exploit existing assets and positions in a profit producing way and simultaneously to explore new technologies and markets” (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2007, p. 189) . The aim of this paper is to provide a research agenda on ICT-based ambidexterity, in order to encourage the improvement of Italian studies around these topics.