부산대학교 도서관

Ambidexterity is regarded as a central concept to explain the innovation mechanism of firms, which simultaneously pursues exploratory activities that are related to long-term and disruptive innovation by creating new knowledge and exploitative activities that are related to short-term and incremental innovation using existing knowledge. Although there exist several affecting factors on ambidexterity and firm performance, this study focused on two – information technology and environmental dynamism. In view point of organizational resources anc capabilities, information technology is an essential means because ambidexterity basically conduct collection and sharing of information inside and outside organization, and creating and sharing of new knowledge as well. Furthermore, dynamism is considered as an important environmental factor from the perspective of technological innovation as an organizational response to the environmental uncertainties. In this study information technology capability was considered as two sub-dimensions –information technology infrastructure and information technology utilization ability – and ambidexteiry was studied in two perspectives – exploitation and exploration. Specifically research hypotheses were established to confirm the causal relationship between information technology capabilities, innovation ambidexterity, and business performance. Furthermore, in order to investigate the moderating effect of environmental dynamism on causal relationships, we divided the whole samples into two groups according to the degree of environmental dynamism – the group with high environmental dynamism and the group with low environmental dynamism –and compared whether there are differences in the causal pathway. The results of this study were as follows. Firstly, analysis result of the influencing relationship between information technology and the ambidexterity showed that both information technology infrastructure and information technology utilization ability were found to have a positive(+) effect on both exploitation and exploration. Through these empirical results, it can be confirmed that information technology infrastructure and information technology utilization ability not only have an important effect on both exploitative innovation activities and explorative innovation activities that constitute the two perspectives of technological innovation, but also are organizational capabilities and resources to achieve the two perspectives of technological innovation. Secondly, as an analysis result of the relationship between ambidexterity and business per-formance, it was found that both innovation activities – exploitation and exploration – had a positive(+) effect on business performance. Also, as a result of analyzing the path coefficient, it was found that the effect of exploitation activities on business performance was higher than that of exploration activities on business performance. Since exploitation mainly refers to activities related to short-term innovation and exploration mainly means carrying out activities related to long-term innovation, the effect on business performance seemed to be high in exploitation in this study. Therefore, when establishing a strategy in practice, in the performance evaluation, there is inevitably a difference in the type and duration of performance creation between exploitation activities and exploration activities, so performance type and criteria shoud be established reflecting the characteristics of each innovation activities. Thirdly, one of the main focus of this study was whether there was a difference in the way that information technology capabilities affect the ambidexterity according to the degree of environmental dynamism, and the effect of exploitation and exploration on business performance. First of all, in the case of the group with low environmental dynamism, both information technology infrastructure and information utilization ability acted as factors influencing exploitation and exploration. However, only the information technology utilization ability acted as a factor influencing exploitation and exploration in the case of the group with high environmental dynamism. These results are inferred to be a phenomenon that occurs due to the nature of dynamism. High dynamism means that the degree of instability and change in the market is large, such as shortening the product life cycle as customer demands change rapidly. It can be interpreted that the information technology utilization ability becomes more important for firms to increase their ability to sense and respond to the market. Next, according to the degree of environmental dynamism, the result investigating whether there was a difference in the effect of two perspectives of ambidexterity showed that the effect of exploration on business performance was relatively high in the group with high environmental dynamism and the effect of exploitation on business performance was relatively high in the group with low environmental dynamism. The results of this study show what the role of information technology is in pursuing ambidexterity, how the role of information technology can change according to environmental dynamism, and resource allocation between the two activities of innovation in response to environmental dynamism.