Exploring Ambidextrous Innovation Tendencies in the Adoption of Telecommunications Technologies

As the importance of information technology has increased within the business domain, so too has the significance of innovating within those information technologies. The recent proliferation of telecommunications technologies, coupled with conventional information technology, has resulted in a new class of applications with important competitive implications. An important issue for organizations, then, is the causal sequence that leads to more innovative telecommunications adoption. Previous innovation research has shown radical and incremental innovation employing vastly different strategy-structure sequence configurations. Two proposals have been offered on how an organization can effectively innovate incrementally and radically: first, through the use of semi-structures, and second, by utilizing both configurations simultaneously, termed ambidextrous. This paper seeks 1) to determine whether organizations are balancing innovation efforts, and 2) if so, are organizations managing the effort using semi-structures or an ambidextrous approach. The research is conducted within the telecommunications industry by employing theoretical typologies of radical and incremental innovation developed in the literature. Based on a sample of 154 organizations the findings suggest that organizations are indeed using a balanced approach to overall innovativeness by using paradoxical, dual models of innovation simultaneously. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed