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The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact and effectiveness of the LearnOvation leadership development program in the welfare services sector in Sweden.

LearnOvation was based on ambidexterity theory for the program content and the research study design. A mixed-method design was applied, using questionnaires among staff (n = 523) and written evaluations with the management teams (n = 60).

Quantitative analysis of the questionnaires indicated little change in managers' and staffs' innovation behaviors, though employee exploration behaviors were strongly and positively correlated with their innovation behaviors. Qualitative leader-written evaluations reported increased understanding of innovation management and the use of exploration and exploitation activities to involve staff in the implementation of creative ideas within the organization.

The authors argue that innovating is about creating a fertile ground for exploration and exploitation processes of learning that support staff's willingness to meet goals, as well as their capability to explore new ideas and experiment in new ways of working. Leadership development activities that engage the entire management team can build the necessary capacity and power to lead innovation processes in highly structured welfare services and free the employees' innovativeness, potentially leading to improved services and employee satisfaction.

With the goal of enhancing the innovation capacity in daily practice, this study adds to the scarcity of research in welfare services on how to actually support management's work on leading successful implementation of creative ideas.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how procurement strategies may be designed to facilitate exploration and exploitation in construction projects.

This paper is based on a literature review of organizational research and construction management literature together with a brief interview study of Swedish clients and contractors.

The theoretical and empirical findings propose that small and simple projects with low uncertainty and scarce resources may focus on exploitation to enhance short-term efficiency through traditional procurement strategies including delivery systems that separate the actors and their activities (i.e. pure design-build- or design-bid-build-contracts), fixed price payment and price focus in bid evaluation. Large complex projects with high uncertainty and customization benefit from combining exploration and exploitation to enhance sustainable performance. This requires collaborative procurement strategies including joint specification through early contractor involvement, cost reimbursement coupled with incentive-based payment, bid evaluation based on multiple criteria and collaborative tools and activities in partnering arrangements.

This paper contributes to organizational learning literature by pinpointing the need for integrating procurement strategies that enhance combination of exploration and exploitation. The main contribution to the construction management literature involves the investigation of how procurement strategies may affect exploration and exploitation, as identified and articulated in the propositions developed in this paper.

From a practical perspective, the findings highlight the importance of tailoring procurement strategies to project characteristics to enhance a suitable balance between exploration and exploitation in construction projects.

The explicit focus on the operational project-level is uncommon but relevant in organizational learning literature.

The purpose of this study is to apply the concept of organizational ambidexterity as a conceptual lens to increase the understanding of tensions between exploitation (continuity) and exploration (change) in Agile software development (ASD) project teams, and particularly the balancing (ambidextrous) strategies utilized.

A conceptual framework was constructed from interdisciplinary sources on ambidexterity. A literature review of publications on ambidexterity in ASD was then performed, and the results from the selected publications were classified according to an extension of the conceptual framework.

Contextual ambidexterity in ASD is affected by the four basic coherent concepts: time, task, team and transition. The study found that most ambidextrous factors and strategies were task and team-related. In addition, a mixture of hard (performance) strategies and soft (social) strategies is needed in order for people/teams to (be able to) become ambidextrous.

To provide a better understanding of ASD, it is important to identify a broader set of ambidextrous factors and strategies that can impact ASD project teams. The expanded conceptual framework can serve as a basis for future empirical research and provide insights to practitioners on how to strengthen ambidexterity in ASD projects.

The contribution is of great importance for ASD research and practice, as ASD methods are a popular method for managing projects within ASD and in other nonsoftware organizations. In addition, as more and more organizations struggle to deal with rapidly changing environments, interest in the phenomena of paradoxical tensions and the strategy (ambidexterity) to deal with these tensions increase.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how the processes of exploration and exploitation have developed in parallel in the literature of organizational ambidexterity and organizational learning, since James March published his seminal paper in 1991. The goal of the paper is to provide a synthesis of exploration and exploitation based on the two areas of literature.

The study is conceptual and no empirical data have been used.

The study advances current understanding of exploration and exploitation by building a new model for organizational ambidexterity that takes into account multiple levels of learning, perspectives from absorptive capacity and inter-organizational learning.

The study’s novelty lies in the creation and discussion of a synthesis of exploration and exploitation stemming from organizational ambidexterity and organizational learning.

Location-based games (LBGs) have afforded novel information technology (IT) developments in how people interact with the physical world. Namely, LBGs have spurred a wave of territoriality (i.e. controlling) and exploration (i.e. discovering) of augmented physical space that are driven by different social dynamics related to group formation, social connectivity and altruism. The aim of this study is to investigate this dynamic and how it is further related to the use intensity of location-based IT.

This work presents a structural equation model that connects social dimensions of play to territorial control and exploration, and playing intensity. The model was tested with psychometric data gathered from a global sample of Pokémon GO players (N = 515).

In the tested sample, players' social self-efficacy and altruism were positively associated with team identification. Team identification, in turn, was positively associated with both territorial control and exploration tendency. Territorial control had a significant relationship with playing intensity; however, exploration tendency did not. This implies territorial control is the stronger predictor of playing intensity.

The findings suggest that human primal urges to conquer and control geographical territory may surface in the digital reimagination of physical space. LBGs offer opportunities for making use of new forms of play (territorial control and exploration) in motivating locative behaviours.

This research quantifies the relationships between a social predisposition, team identification, territorial control, exploration tendency and playing intensity in the context of Pokémon GO. It contributes new knowledge to the understanding of territorial behaviour (control and exploration) in location-based IT.

This paper aims to explore whether the principles behind improvement methods and the underlying learning orientations of ambidexterity have the potential to support the managing of ideas for implementation.

By combining improvement methods and ambidexterity, this study presents a pragmatic framework for innovative working with a scientific underpinning linked to organizational learning.

The descriptive stages in the plan-do-check-act method for improvement are instructive in their focus on progress and helpful in untangling the more explanatory nature of ambidexterity to frame innovative working.

Although the framework’s usefulness for innovative working is subject to future studies, the implementation, validation and results of the framework in pilot research may contribute to the body of knowledge.

The proposed framework can be used in teaching the key role of strategic leadership to explore and exploit over time. The framework has the potential to guide innovative working in practice by making better use of the employees’ tacit knowledge in such a way that they are empowered to explore new ways of defining problems and searching for solutions to improve organizational performance. The results of the implementation will impact the employees’ quality of life.

This study advances the current understanding of how the seemingly contradictory activities of exploration and exploitation can model an integrative learning approach.

This study investigated how organizations can maintain their supply chain (SC) resilience in situations where high-impact shocks cannot be absorbed and what capabilities are needed. The article is an empirical exploration of a socio-ecological view of resilience in the SC context.

The case under study in this article is that of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and MSF's reconfiguration of its supply management processes in response to the supply shocks during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In total, 503 internal documents and ERP extractions from six databases from late 2019 to September 2020, 43 semi-structured interviews and a 3-round policy Delphi process were used to investigate this phenomenon.

The authors' results show that throughout the pandemic, MSF adapted its procurement and supply processes to cope with supply shortages at both the international and local levels of the SC. This was possible due to the organization's capacity to use its exploitation and exploration capabilities of the organization at the same time.

This research is based on the single in-depth case study of a medical aid organization. Further research should investigate this phenomenon in commercial companies with similar or different organizational structures.

This study constitutes a first attempt to empirically demonstrate that the four phases of the adaptive cycle put forth in the panarchy theory constitute a suitable representation of the reconfigurations that SCs follow in response to a high-impact shock. The study also adds to the growing body of knowledge on resilience by including ambidexterity as a mechanism to achieve resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to propose how a bottom-up creation of an ambidextrous organization can be enabled. By integrating research on “contextual ambidexterity” and “individual and organizational capacity building”, an “innovation capacity building” framework is conceptualized that suggests how balance between exploration and exploitation can be maintained.

The study is conceptual. As no data are utilized, focus is on discussing the links between the two theoretical perspectives and the advantages of the proposed innovation capacity building framework.

The innovation capacity building framework discusses the influence, both positive and negative, of the local organizational context for ambidexterity, and the interactions required such as feedback between the management team and the employees so they together can build an ambidextrous working culture. A culture in which it is the individual employee that is responsible for switching between activities related to exploration and exploitation and where the management team empowers the employees to do so.

This study focuses on contextual ambidexterity and how contextual ambidexterity can be implemented as a way of working in contemporary organizations. The originality lies in the proposed framework and in the dedicated focus on “how” ambidexterity can be implemented in organizations.

This paper aims to understand what prevents established law firms from embracing digitalization and discusses barriers to solving the emerging ambidexterity problem. Law firms have been organized in the same way for decades. However, digital opportunities are emerging and new competitors are challenging established firms. This presents established law firms with an ambidexterity problem: How can law firms simultaneously uphold their successful way of working while entering a new world of digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning?

Previous research suggests that law firms are slow in digital transformation, compared to other Professional Service Firms (PSFs). In this paper, the authors explore why this happens. Interview data from representatives in law firms are complemented with data from architects as well as legal industry data and field notes. The data have been analyzed to spot patterns and emerging themes.

The authors find that established law firms face structural and cultural barriers to applying ambidextrous solutions. When comparing law firms with architecture firms, the authors see that while established architecture firms have combined digital exploration with ongoing exploitation, established law firms have focused on exploitation, leaving digital exploration to new legal tech firms. This difference can be attributed to industry context and professional culture.

This paper shows that both structural and contextual ambidexterity is a challenge for established law firms. This paper contributes to the understanding of barriers to embrace digital technology, and supports practitioners in efforts to remove these barriers.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of paradoxes, underlying tensions and potential management strategies when integrating digital technologies into existing lean-based production systems (LPSs), with the aim of achieving synergies and fostering the development of production systems.

This study adopts a collaborative management research (CMR) approach to identify patterns of organisational tensions and paradoxes and explore management strategies to overcome them. The data were collected through interviews and focus group interviews with experts on lean and/or digital technologies from the companies, from documents and from workshops with the in-case researchers.

The findings of this paper provide insights into the salient organisational paradoxes embraced in the integration of digital technologies in LPS by identifying different aspects of the performing, organising, learning and belonging paradoxes. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the intricacies and relatedness between different paradoxes and their resolutions, and more specifically, how a resolution strategy adopted to manage one paradox might unintentionally generate new tensions. This, in turn, calls for either re-contextualising actions to counteract the drift or the adoption of new resolution strategies.

This paper adds perspective to operations management (OM) research through the use of paradox theory, and we (1) provide a fine-grained perspective on why integration sometimes “fails” and label the forces of internal drift as mechanisms of imbalances and (2) provide detailed insights into how different management and resolution strategies are adopted, especially by identifying re-contextualising actions as a key to rebalancing organisational paradoxes in favour of the integration of digital technologies in LPSs.