Julian Birkinshaw

The Antecedents, Consequences, and Mediating Role of Organizational Ambidexterity

We investigated contextual organizational ambidexterity, defined as the capacity to simultaneously achieve alignment and adaptability at a business-unit level. Building on the leadership and organization context literatures, we argue that a context characterized by a combination of stretch, discipline, support, and trust facilitates contextual ambidexterity. Further, ambidexterity mediates the relationship between these contextual features and performance. Data collected from 4,195 individuals in 41 business units supported our hypotheses.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Antecedents, Outcomes, and Moderators

Organizational ambidexterity, defined as an organizations ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of todays business demands while simultaneously being adaptive to changes in the environment, has gained increasing interest in recent years. In this article, the authors review various literature streams to develop a comprehensive model that covers research into the antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of organizational ambidexterity. They indicate gaps within and across different research domains and point to important avenues for future research.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance

Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through differentiation or through integration? Does ambidexterity occur at the individual or organizational level? Must organizations take a static or dynamic perspective on ambidexterity? Finally, can ambidexterity arise internally, or do firms have to externalize some processes? We provide an overview of the seven articles included in this special issue and suggest several avenues for future research.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS: THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SUBSIDIARY INITIATIVES

This paper defines initiative as a key manifestation of corporate entrepreneurship, and examines the types of initiative exhibited in a sample of six subsidiaries of multinational corporations. From a detailed analysis of 39 separate initiatives, four distinct types are identified, which we refer to as ‘global,’ ‘local,’ ‘internal’ and ‘global–internal hybrid,’ to correspond to the locus of the market opportunity whence each arose. Two important conclusions are indicated. First, entrepreneurship at the subsidiary level has the potential to enhance local responsiveness, worldwide learning and global integration, a much broader role than previously envisioned. Second, the use of contextual mechanisms to create differentiated subsidiary roles has its limitations because each initiative type is facilitated in different ways.

Building firm-specific advantages in multinational corporations: the role of subsidiary initiative

A central theme of much of the recent literature on the strategy of the multinational corporation (MNC) is the increasingly important role played by subsidiary companies as contributors to the development of firm-specific advantages. Traditional academic models that viewed subsidiaries as either ‘market access’ providers or as recipients of the parent company’s technology transfers (Vernon, 1966) gave way in the 1980s to richer conceptualizations in which subsidiaries tapped into leading-edge ideas, undertook important research and development work, and became active participants in the formulation and implementation of strategy (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1986; Hedlund, 1986; Gupta and Govindarajan, 1994). The generation of firm-specific advantages, correspondingly, shifted from being the sole concern of the parent company to a collective responsibility for the corporate network.

Managing the Post-acquisition Integration Process: How the Human Iintegration and Task Integration Processes Interact to Foster Value Creation

The paper reports a study of the post-acquisition integration process in three foreign acquisitions made by Swedish multinationals. Detailed interview data and questionnaire responses in both acquiring and acquired firms are presented. The sub-processes of task integration and human integration are separated out and it is shown that effective integration in these cases was achieved through a two-phase process. In phase one, task integration led to a satisficing solution that limited the interaction between acquired and acquiring units, while human integration proceeded smoothly and led to cultural convergence and mutual respect. In phase two, there was renewed task integration built on the success of the human integration that had been achieved, which led to much greater interdependencies between acquired and acquiring units.

INNOVATION IN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS: CONTROL AND COMMUNICATION PATTERNS IN INTERNATIONAL R&D OPERATIONS

This paper addresses issues of global innovation in multinational corporations by examining the patterns of communication and control in international RD (2) local and international adaptors both focus their communication on their internal corporate network; and (3) international creators have strong internally and externally oriented networks of relationships. The implications for the management of global innovation are discussed.

Knowledge Flows Within Multinational Corporations: Explaining Subsidiary Isolation and Its Performance Implications

Applying a new theoretical and empirical approach to intrafirm knowledge transfers, this paper provides some initial insight to the little-researched phenomenon of why some subsidiaries are isolated from knowledge-transfer activities within the multinational corporation (MNC). Knowledge transfer is framed as a problemistic search process initiated by the recipient unit. We show that knowledge flows from units that are perceived to be highly capable to units that perceive themselves to be highly capable. Knowledge flows are also associated with existing levels of communication and reciprocity. Taken together, these findings suggest that knowledge transfers in MNCs typically occur between highly capable members of an “in crowd,” and the isolated minority rarely, if ever, engages in knowledge-sharing activities. Finally, we show that the isolated minority underperforms other subsidiaries, suggesting the possibility of a “liability of internal isolation.”

External Sources of Knowledge, Governance Mode, and R&D Performance

This article examines how the choice of governance mode for external R&D, along with openness to new ideas and codifiability of knowledge, affects R&D performance. Superior R&D performance is therefore viewed as arising through (a) the choice of approaches used by the firm to access knowledge from outside (university partnering, alliance partnering, and contracting), (b) the knowledge context of the firm (its openness to new ideas and the codifiability of its knowledge assets), and (c) the interactions between these two sets of factors. These arguments are tested, and mostly supported, using data on the R&D activities of 107 large firms based in the United Kingdom and Sweden.

When does university research get commercialized? Creating ambidexterity in research institutions

We examine the tensions that make it difficult for a research-oriented university to achieve commercial outcomes. Building on the organizational ambidexterity literature, we specify the nature of the tensions (between academic and commercially-oriented activities) at both organizational and individual levels of analysis, and how these can be resolved. We develop hypotheses linking specific aspects of the organization and the individual researcher to the likelihood of their research projects generating commercial outcomes, and we test them using a novel dataset of 207 Research Council-funded projects, combining objective data on project outcomes with the perceptions of principal investigators. We show that the tension between academic and commercial demands is more salient at the level of the individual researcher than at the level of the organization. Universities show evidence that they are able to manage the tensions between academic and commercial demands, through for example their creation of ‘dual structures’. At the individual level, on the other hand, the tensions are more acute, so that the people who deliver commercial outcomes tend to be rather different to those who are accustomed to producing academic outcomes.