Towards Dynamic Exploration and Exploitation - Reviewing Ambidexterity in the Digital Era

The proliferation of digital technologies is providing organisations with new business opportunities as well as challenging them to transform their existing business models. Accordingly, IS scholars are increasingly striving to understand how incumbents are able to leverage digital technologies, while also maintaining efficiency and reliability of existing operations. A prominent concept that IS scholars have drawn upon to examine these opposing activities is ambidexterity. As yet, we however lack a synthesised view of ambidexterity approaches and outcomes in the digital era. We conduct a systematic literature review to examine what ambidexterity approaches exist for incumbents and what is known about the outcomes of ambidexterity in the digital era. We synthesise three ambidexterity approaches recently put forward by IS scholars and conclude that ambidexterity outcomes remain somewhat obscure. Finally, we suggest four avenues for future IS research on ambidexterity