Ambidexterity, Knowledge Management, and Innovation in Technology Development Zones: The Case of Turkey

Introduction

In today’s world of intense competition, firms seek to reduce their costs as much as possible while striving to increase their productivity and quality. Therefore, managers have to control many contrasting situations concurrently to sustain the business. The rapid advancement of technology and globalization has brought a new dimension to the competition and firms are attaching more importance to notions such as novelty, creativity, and speed because they pave the way for knowledge as a strategic value. Firms need to implement innovation activities to manage chaos and also enable sustainability.

Nowadays, the concept that is creating a difference between firms is knowledge and the human factor that builds knowledge. Creating, sharing, using, and managing knowledge within firms becomes part of the organizational culture. The fact that knowledge can become a competitive weapon for firms in a globalized world and that capital-intensive firms are replaced by knowledge-intensive firms shows how important knowledge management is for firms. Yet firms can encounter an insufficient knowledge level; there can be a gap between the available knowledge level of firms and the required knowledge level needed to produce new products, processes, or services. Firms need creative studies to close this gap. At this point, the important thing for a firm is the quality and amount of knowledge and how it will be utilized to carry out innovation activities. Because, firms increase their creativity and performance by integrating knowledge management and knowledge processes (Shahzad, Bajwa, Siddiqi, Ahmid and Sultani, 2016).

Creating knowledge is an essential point for creating innovation processes, and innovation management is a critical issue for enterprises. When considered from this aspect, the long-term success of any enterprise is mainly to discover new skills while developing current skills also (Raisch, Birkinshaw, Probst and Tushman, 2009).

Firms need to take advantage of their basic knowledge and as well explore new opportunities by opening doors to new information (Cantarello, Martini and Nosella, 2012). Ambidexterity also handles the innovation and knowledge management that interacts with it as well as the variables affecting ambidexterity. The main feature of successful firms can balance explorative and exploitative strategies (Chang and Hughes, 2012). Anzenbahcer and Wagner (2019: 572) highlighted “the ability to balance exploratory and exploitative activities has become more and more crucial for firms in today’s increasingly globalized business environment in the face of rapid technological change”. Ambidextrous firms can balance and manage exploitation and exploration knowledge (Raisch et al., 2009).

A resource-based approach is a tool by which firms gain an advantage over their competitors by using their internal resources (Barney, 1991). With the resource-based approach, it was tried to explain why some companies are more successful and gain a sustainable competitive advantage (Khan and Zaman, 2020). This study adopts a resource-based approach and a knowledge-based approach and aims to research how knowledge management and innovation activities, which enable an advantageous position for firms over their opponents, influence ambidexterity and business performance. This chapter answer these research questions: whether knowledge management and innovation activities affect ambidexterity and performance of the firm? In this chapter, the relationship between ambidexterity, innovation, knowledge management and firm performance will be examined.