José-Mauricio G. Geleilate

Organizing for Innovation Ambidexterity in Emerging Markets Taking Advantage of Supplier Involvement and Foreignness

Firms struggle to be ambidextrous in the sense of being able to successfully manage both new and incremental innovation activities simultaneously. Applying the knowledge-based view, we examine the important moderating influences of supplier involvement and foreignness on the relationship between innovation ambidexterity and performance. We test our hypotheses at the business-unit level of analysis in the emerging market of Brazil. We examine two types of innovation ambidexterity: the balanced dimension and the combined dimension. We found that firms possessing greater supplier involvement reap higher performance benefits from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity. Last, foreign subsidiaries also achieved higher levels of performance than domestic firms from the combined dimension of innovation ambidexterity.

Managing the complexities of internationalization: The role of business group diversification

Internationalized firms often deal with different institutional configurations across countries which in turn can generate tensions in their operations due to information asymmetries. Considering that business groups can be an efficient organizational form utilized to minimize transaction costs, we explore how business groups can also leverage their international performance in the presence of institutional complexities. Using a unique longitudinal sample of 62 Latin American firms, we suggest that the negative impacts on performance caused by international institutional complexities can be alleviated trough business group diversification. Specifically, we point out that business group diversification positively affect business group performance in the presence of institutional voids and aggregated complexity, while in the case of societal complexities results were not significant.