Temporal Ambidexterity: How Digital Innovation Labs Connect Exploration and Exploitation for Digital Innovation

Firms apply ambidexterity to balance between exploration and exploitation. Exploration enables (digital) innovation when digital technologies are incorporated. Exploitation leverages innovations and generates long-term business value. However, existing forms of ambidexterity are insufficient for digital innovation and firms are implementing new organizational forms, such as digital innovation labs (DILs), to foster digital innovation. We studied the DILs of nine different firms to analyze their contribution to ambidexterity. Comparing these cases regarding intra-organizational exchange and integration, we find that the implementation of DILs yields a new form of ambidexterity. The empirical evidence shows that ambidexterity is achieved through a dedicated unit for exploration (i.e. the DIL) and the temporary transfer of people between the DIL and the operational parts of the firm. Based on this conceptualization we term this new form ‘temporal ambidexterity’. We uncover that temporal ambidexterity is suited better for digital innovation