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Research at FHWien der WKW

Organizational Ambidexterity in SMEs

Ambidextrous organization: designing dual structures for digital innovation in SME

Digital innovations offer new business opportunities and thus great potential for established companies in all industries. In order to successfully transform their businesses, firms need to integrate these new technologies into their organizations. They are forced to leave old “paths” and create new structures and processes. This project aims to understand how SMEs that constitute the backbone of the Viennese economy can succeed in overcoming the challenges of this transformation.

Sponsor: City of Vienna MA23 – Economy, Labor and Statistics
Project period: 01.04.2022 to 31.03.2025
Project duration: 36 months

Gefördert von Stadt Wien

Contact

Institute for Digital Transformation and Strategy (IDS)
Dr. techn. Patrick Rupprecht, MSc, MSc, MA

Project Leader

Tel.: +43 690 40 476 128

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Project Description

Organizational ambidexterity can be described as a firm’s ability to create and balance exploitative and explorative activities within the organization, i.e. to use existing competences in order to become more efficient and develop innovations simultaneously.

© IDS of FHWien der WKW – Pixabay

How can companies find the balance between innovation and efficiency?

The research project “Organizational Ambidexterity in SMEs” focuses on this perspective and utilizes it to analyze SMEs in Vienna. The project aims to answer the following questions:

  • How do SMEs currently implement organizational ambidexterity on the levels of strategy, organization and leadership?
  • Which challenges and problems do managers of SMEs face during implementation?
  • How should processes and structures for organizational ambidexterity be designed in SMEs?

Project Goals

In a first step, a quantitative analysis will be conducted in order to understand whether and how organizational ambidexterity has been implemented on the levels of strategy, organization, and leadership in Austrian SMEs. Based on the results, a more in-depth qualitative analysis will be undertaken in order to examine the possibilities of designing types of ambidexterity and investigate the role of the top management for implementation. Finally, the quantitative and qualitative findings will be used to develop a theoretically and empirically founded management concept for organizational ambidexterity in SMEs.

The results of the research project will be presented at scientific conferences and published in scientific journals. In addition, the findings will be communicated to students and interested parties from corporate practice via courses, lectures and articles in business journals.

Project Partners

A number of scientific and business partners are involved in the project. If you are interested in a concrete cooperation, please contact our project manager.