Fractal and dynamic organizational ambidexterity

The ability to combine exploration and exploitation activities is a critical factor for organizational sustainability and survival. For the large number of companies, achieving ambidexterity is a desired, but a highly challenging process. Many of them fail to compete for both agendas simultaneously. The reason is the inability to implement a fractal ambidexterity, which is able to replicate exploration and exploitation simultaneously at multiple levels of a company. We argue that ambidexterity is fractal and dynamic phenomenon. By crossing levels of analysis, our research shows that in ambidextrous organizations, exploration and exploitation can emerge in diverse structures and take different forms. Both activities able to appear at diverse levels and change the degree of their intensity. To be sustainably innovative, an ambidextrous company needs to define and to achieve the appropriate proportion of exploration and exploitation simultaneously at different organizational levels.