Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
In search of ambidexterity
Exploration and bricolage
Kenichi KuwashimaNobuyuki InamizuNobuo Takahashi
Author information
JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS

2020 Volume 19 Issue 4 Pages 127-142

Details
Abstract

The concept of ambidexterity and particularly the concept of exploitation are ambiguous. March (1991), a study that became the theoretical basis for several research studies, asserted that exploitation has a trade-off relationship with exploration including innovation, and on the basis of this aspect, Levinthal and March (1993) proposed the myopia of learning. Nevertheless, Levinthal later modeled exploitation that can be called as innovation. Some argued that exploration and exploitation are bipolar on one axis, and some argued that they are two orthogonal axes. In this study, we proposed using Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” instead of “exploitation.” This bricolage is a concept of making do with the tools and materials at hand (performing innovation), and bricolage and exploration are used together with ambidexterity being the normal form. We examine this aspect by using Japan’s response to the current Coronavirus disease pandemic as an example.

Content from these authors
© 2020 Kenichi Kuwashima, Nobuyuki Inamizu, and Nobuo Takahashi. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution 4.0 International] license.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Next article
feedback
Top