Organizing strategic entrepreneurship to enable product innovation in new and young technology-based firms

We examine how strategic entrepreneurship affects explorative and exploitative product innovation and how their synthesis as innovation ambidexterity affects firm performance. We find that opportunity-seeking through entrepreneurial orientation positively affects both explorative and exploitative innovation, but advantage-seeking through sourcing and managing relational resources show differential effects on innovation activity. Those that achieve innovation ambidexterity experience superior firm performance. Our work contributes a first test of strategic entrepreneurship as it applies to product innovation management in new and young technology-based firms, and offers a model reconciling how opposing constructs contained in strategic entrepreneurship and innovation theory can cohabitate in firms.