Organisational Ambidexterity And Innovation In The Virtual Environment: A Case Of Open Source Software (Oss) Communities

The tension between exploitation and exploration in organizational learning and innovation is a familiar one. The notion of an ambidextrous organisation denotes the paradox of managing innovation in an increasingly complex and fast changing environment. Also, ambidextrous organizations are ones that can sustain their competitive advantage by operating in multiple modes simultaneously - managing for short-term efficiency by emphasizing stability and exploitation, and for long-term innovation by undertaking risky explorative activities. While the concept of organisational ambidexterity is an attractive one, the process of knowledge creation and innovation underpinning it, is not well understood. In this paper, we examine a unique example of innovative communities in the virtual environment: the hacker communities in open source software (OSS) which display many characteristic features of organisational ambidexterity. We argue that the OSS community has certain distinct characteristics regarding membership, purpose and structure that make it innovative. The study focuses on knowledge creating and sharing, and examines the spatial distributedness, relational proximity (simultaneity and speed of reconfiguration) and processual characteristics that contribute to the development of virtual ambidexterity. The empirical evidence is based on individual interviews and observations of the OSS communities associated with GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment), KDE (K Desktop environment) and OSS members working in other related projects.