Organizing explorative innovation within and between firms

To stay competitive in the long term, companies not only need to exploit their existing knowledge, they also need to explore new knowledge. At the same time, combining exploitative and explorative innovation is challenging because it triggers tensions at the individual, project and organizational level. In this paper, I provide an overview of the most important intra- and inter-organizational strategies to successfully combine exploitative and explorative innovation. First, I point out the importance of structural and contextual ambidexterity for organizing explorative innovation within firms. Subsequently, I discuss the possibilities for exploitative and explorative innovation between firms. Finally, I discuss the main implications of these insights for researchers, managers and policy makers.