Know yourself and find your partners

Purpose - This paper aims to examine whether balancing exploration and exploitation rather than emphasizing one over the other leads to better performance. This study also examines the effects of different kinds of external collaboration on a firm’s performance in relation to the firm’s current innovative direction that shows firms’ internal weighting of exploration or exploitation. Design/methodology/approach - Data on Korean manufacturing firms collected from the Korean Innovation Survey were used to test the hypotheses. This study suggested the concept of innovative direction (θ) to examine current innovation capabilities about how much the firms focused on exploration or exploitation. The directionality of exploration or exploitation has not been reflected in previous measures of ambidexterity. Factor analysis and hierarchical regression were used to test hypotheses. Findings - The findings suggest that balancing exploration and exploitation is beneficial for a firm’s performance, and explorative collaboration is more beneficial for firms internally emphasizing exploitation. However, it showed that for exploration-oriented firms, exploitative collaboration does not supplement exploitative activities. Research limitations/implications - Inter-organizational collaboration helps to develop ambidexterity that leads to better performance. Because inter-organizational collaboration involves substantial costs and is time-consuming, selecting and maintaining partners has to be conducted carefully. Based on the currently pursuing innovative directions, firms can make more appropriate decision for finding external cooperative partners with much of efficiency. When firms find collaborative partners, it is the first thing to look inside themselves. Originality/value - Previous studies mainly focused on the selection and balance of the partnership between exploration and exploitation without considering the role of an internal innovative strategy firms are currently pursuing. Identifying firms’ current states and finding partners that can supplement any deficiencies provides the most efficient option for the ambidextrous organization. Consideration of inter-organizational collaborations based on the analysis of internal conditions will be fruitful for the study of ambidexterity.