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The purpose of this study is to increase the current understanding of how public sector organizations dynamically balance exploration and exploitation of digital initiatives, i.e. the enactment of digital ambidexterity.

This study uses Zimmermann, Raisch and Cardinal’s perspective of configurational practices for addressing the enactment of digital ambidexterity. The method comprises a qualitative, interpretative case study of a large municipality in Sweden, using both interviews and secondary data.

Through the perspective of configurational practices, the study identifies and describes a set of sub-practices that constitute the enactment of digital ambidexterity. This is then used for theorizing how configurational practices involve the balancing of closeness and distance.

This study is limited by being a single, non-longitudinal case of a Swedish municipality that has implications for generalizability and transferability. Moreover, it opens up for new perspectives to the future study of the enactment of ambidexterity in the public sector.

Organizations striving for digital ambidexterity are recommended to use the configurational approach to assess and design their governance to build ambidextrous capabilities through a combination of closeness and distance.

This study is aimed at strengthening public sectors abilities for continued relevance for its stakeholders over time. With increased need for digital innovation within the public sector, the findings and recommendations derived from the study lead to increased innovation capability, which in turn is expected to lead to increased relevance of services.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that addresses how ambidexterity is enacted within the public sector following the configurational approach. As such, it opens up for new perspectives on organizational ambidexterity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how important is co-location of R&D and production for firms originated from high-cost countries and to provide evidence of the relationship between the different strategies of location choices and co-location.

In order to investigate the relationship between R&D/design-production co-location and strategies of location choices for production, this paper uses a cluster analysis of 37 Italian firms that operate in fashion industry.

This article finds that co-location results in a dominant strategy for firms under the following conditions: high level of product customization, coordination difficulties between R&D and production, rapid change in production process technologies and product complexity difficult to be coded.

This paper presents some limitations in that it focuses only on fashion industry without considering other sectors.

This paper has some managerial implication in that offers some insight on decision making in organization. In particular offers some insights of how important is having an internal R&D/design function rather than collaborating with external designers in order to achieve competitive advantage in terms of product quality, product design and also brand name reputation.

This paper suggests that the co-location of R&D and production may improve the firms' performance considering the need for constant interaction between the two units. Moreover, it suggests that the co-location of R&D and production both within and external (within the firms' region and/or within the country) to the firms might be important. Furthermore, larger firms in terms of turnover have a greater preference to locate the R&D function close to the production function.