As industries converge and new solutions to complex challenges require collaboration across different organizations, management practice and research increasingly turn their attention to creating and leveraging business ecosystems for value creation. Such ecosystems are usually seen as collaborative networks enabling open innovation through knowledge flows between different organizations. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the agriculture industry, where organizations address overarching challenges like food security, sustainability, affordability, and the need for large-scale technological innovation through collaborating with a variety of stakeholders, including businesses, technology providers, academic institutions, government entities, and consumers. The resulting open innovation in these ecosystems can lead to more sustainable practices, innovative solutions to environmental challenges, or improved food supply. However, leveraging ecosystems for such value creation through open innovation is challenging due to competing governance structures between the ecosystem and the individual organizations. Accordingly, organizations in the ecosystem must find a suitable blend of formal and informal rules, procedures, claimant rights and other interfaces to facilitate the accumulation, development, and allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of organizational output and the resolution of internal conflicts with the required knowledge flows. Managed ecosystems aim to address this challenge by establishing a central organization that coordinates the ecosystem with ambidextrous governance structures to balance the internal exploitative business activities with the external, explorative ecosystem activities. This balance is crucial as it allows organizations to deploy and share existing knowledge and develop and integrate new knowledgefrom both within and outside their boundaries to drive innovation and solve complex challenges in the ecosystem. However, the specific knowledge conversion mechanisms and their interplay with ambidextrous governance structures to facilitate open innovation in managed ecosystems are currently poorly understood and thus investigated in this study. By employing an abductive research, the study builds on a first conceptual model derived from existing literature to subsequently collect and analyze qualitative data from various actors in the OCP Group's phosphate network. This single case study represents a complex managed ecosystem in the global fertilizer industry, centered on the extraction, processing, and distribution of phosphate and its derivatives. The ecosystem integrates large-scale mining operations, advanced chemical processing facilities, and innovative sustainability practices, like the efficient slurry pipeline transport system. Strengthened by global subsidiaries and strategic partnerships for market expansion and technological exchange, the ecosystem also emphasizes community development and research through initiatives and educational institutions. As a result, the study proposes a novel empirical framework that specifies fundamental formal and informal knowledge conversion mechanisms in managed ecosystems for facilitating open innovation, including cross sector partnerships, community engagement initiatives, integrated dynamic knowledge integration networks, and practical training programs. The subsequent description of their interplay and with ambidextrous governance structures highlights their reciprocity leading to an interlinked-ambidextrous ecosystem. The novel insights from the study are a relevant contribution to current open innovation research on knowledge flows and ambidextrous governance in business ecosystems. Here, the study provides a deeper understanding of interlinked-ambidextrous innovation units in ecosystems where organizations are interconnected with different stakeholders through multiple suitable governance structures and specific knowledge conversion mechanisms, which enables them to successfully combine exploration and exploitation activities for value creation. As governance structures delineate the distribution of jointly created value in ecosystems, a suitable design of the interplay of knowledge conversion mechanisms with an ambidextrous governance framework enables organizations to balance and integrate internal and external activities and controls for effective value creation and strategic adaptability in dynamic environments within the agriculture industry and beyond.

In today’s competitive and volatile markets, organizations need to be ambidextrous to succeed, that is, they need to explore and exploit simultaneously. In extant literature, structural ambidexterity as a specific form of ambidexterity has received immense attention. The general idea of this approach is to separate exploration and exploitation into distinct organizational units, meaning that the two orientations are differentiated using organizational structure. More recently, however, researchers began to acknowledge that integration – as a counterpart to differentiation – at the unit level might represent an important and so far, often neglected success factor for organizations pursuing ambidexterity, especially when it comes to knowledge transfer, coordination and information flow between units. Drawing on Social Capital Theory and literature on knowledge exchange across units and teams, we investigate the role of boundary-spanning between explorative and exploitative units that are structurally separated with regard to their relation to product innovation performance of subsequent organizations. Our aim is to provide concrete quantitative evidence and a detailed picture regarding the effects that boundary-spanning (i.e., activities to build “bridges” across organizational boundaries) between explorative and exploitative units have on the product innovation performance (i.e., share of turnover with new-to-firm and new-to-market product innovations as well as innovation speed as a mediator). In addition to testing whether boundary-spanning activities between explorative and exploitative units are positively related to product innovation performance, we also test whether this relationship is subject to a too-much-of-a-good-thing effect, which would be reflected in a curvilinear relationship between boundary-spanning and innovation performance measures, forming an inverted U-shape function. Using data from Swiss manufacturing companies collected in the European Manufacturing Survey (EMS) 2018, we conduct a quantitative analysis using both partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS SEM) as well as necessary condition analysis (NCA), as the two approaches offer complementary strengths and insights. Our analyses are based on a sample of n=479 complete cases in which structural ambidexterity (or blended forms of structural ambidexterity) were present. The results of our study not only show that boundary-spanning between explorative and exploitative units has a positive effect on product innovation performance (i.e., share of turnover with i) new-to-firm products and ii) new-to-market products), but also that boundary-spanning between explorative and exploitative units is indeed a necessary condition for high product innovation performance with regard to both new-to-firm products (i.e., product innovation in general) as well as new-to-market products (i.e., more radical product innovation). In addition, our results show that boundary-spanning between explorative and exploitative units is negatively related to innovation speed, meaning that more boundary-spanning could in fact, and contrary to our expectation, lead to slower product innovation processes. This effect is, however, only marginally significant. Nevertheless, this refutes the hypothesis that bridging ties between separated explorative and exploitative units not only lead to better results, but also to faster outcomes. Instead, our results indicate that bridging ties can indeed lead to better (i.e., more successful in terms of share of turnover), but not to faster product innovation in ambidextrous organizations. What is particularly interesting here, however, is the fact that innovation speed – also in the opposite direction of our hypotheses – is negatively associated with product innovation performance. These results, hence, demonstrate that innovation speed is not necessarily a good thing and that product innovation processes should not be rushed, but instead, must be managed with due care and diligence. In summary, our results lend support to the claim that boundary-spanning activities between explorative and exploitative units are a mandatory prerequisite (i.e., a must-have) for ambidextrous organizations wanting to achieve a high product innovation performance. The study provides in-depth, empirical insights into the effects that boundary-spanning activities between explorative and exploitative units have on the product innovation performance of organizations pursuing structural ambidexterity or blended forms of structural ambidexterity. These insights are highly relevant for researchers and practitioners alike, as there is currently not enough quantitative evidence on how boundary-spanning activities as well as the thereby established relational or bridging ties, connectedness, and social capital between explorative and exploitative units influence the outcomes in structurally ambidextrous organizations. We extend the current body of knowledge regarding this important question and provide a detailed, multifaceted quantitative analysis using different, complementary methods.

This paper reports the results from a research-in-progress project investigating the effects of boundary spanning activities between explorative and exploitative units in structurally ambidextrous organizations on their product innovation performance, both in terms of more incremental (i.e., new-to-firm) and more radical (i.e., new-to-market) innovation. Drawing on Social Capital Theory (SCT) and applying a Knowledge-based View (KBV), a dataset from the European Manufacturing Survey (EMS) collected in Switzerland consisting of data from 476 organizations was analyzed. The preliminary results of the data show that boundary spanning activities between explorative and exploitative units are indeed related to higher product innovation performance and that innovation speed represents an important mediator in this relationship.

With scarce research on the intersection of corporate venturing and firm strategy, few companies succeed in using their dedicated corporate venturing units (CVUs) for strategic renewal. This study examines this intersection in so-called interlinked-ambidextrous CVUs. Through relational interlinks with internal and external stakeholders, these organizational entities combine the exploration of new market opportunities with the exploitation of existing core competencies to develop new competitive advantages for their parent companies. That way, they aim to create organizationally consequential new business that can change the competitive positioning of a company. To investigate such strategic corporate venturing, the study collects and analyses qualitative data from interlinked-ambidextrous units in 16 European companies. The resulting key themes and their relationships are mapped onto an exploratory model of strategic corporate venturing that includes organizational context factors as antecedents; process activities, relational mechanisms and dynamic capabilities as enablers; and an ambidextrous orientation as a mediator for the intended strategic renewal task. Embedding these key findings within existing theory provides valuable contributions to the development of the strategic corporate venturing concept and the understanding of interlinked-ambidextrous CVUs. This can help practitioners tackle the strategic renewal challenge through corporate venturing.

The publication-based dissertation investigates how to leverage corporate venturing units for the continuous stra- tegic renewal of established companies. It includes four self-contained research papers, from which three are de- veloped for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, and one for publication as an academic teaching case study. The first paper uses the methodology of a systematic literature review to integrate different research streams of organizational ambidexterity, dynamic capabilities, and corporate venturing. As a result, it provides an inte- grated framework and identifies interlinked-ambidextrous corporate venturing units as a promising research av- enue for strategic corporate venturing. The second paper applies a multiple-case study approach to differentiate contemporary corporate venturing units from a strategic renewal perspective. As a result, it can provide a novel typology and suggest a first organizational framework for strategic corporate venturing. The third paper investi- gates the identified interlinked-ambidextrous corporate venturing units deeper through additional qualitative data collection and analysis. This results in a proposed organizational model of strategic corporate venturing with spe- cific organizational antecedents alongside process activities, dynamic capabilities and organizational interlinks as possible enablers, and ambidextrous orientation as a possible mediator to develop organizationally consequential new business. The fourth paper helps to apply these findings by describing the strategic renewal challenge of the digital scale-up Freeletics and leading through the organizational set-up of a suitable strategic corporate venturing project in the teaching note. To integrate all papers within one dissertation, they are framed with an introductory and concluding section. The introduction describes the overall need and motivation for the research and intro- duces the key theoretical concepts as well as the four research papers and their publication status. The concluding section provides theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations and future research opportunities across all included papers. Altogether, the dissertation enhances existing corporate venturing theory to better lev- erage the concept for strategic renewal and provides new insights into the establishing and application of dynamic capabilities and organizational ambidexterity in dedicated corporate venturing units.