• Korea Trade Review
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.83-126
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• 2023

The revenue histogram of venture businesses is shifting from bell-shaped normal distribution to power-law distribution, which implies that the fitness landscape of the venture businesses ecosystem is changing to be more rugged terrain. We argue that the firm should adopt both exploitation (fast follower) and exploration (or first mover) strategies not to get stuck in local maxima in the rugged fitness landscape from the complex system perspective. By designing and performing agent-based modeling simulation experiments which consist of three types of agents (new technologies, entrepreneurs, and consumers), we demonstrated that the ambidexterity strategy showed the highest performance score in three of four different environment except 'Fast Widening' case where the exploitation strategy showed the highest performance score under low technology appropriation and fast disruptive technology development speed. By investigating the financial and other statistics of 617 top venture businesses who have earned 100B won or higher annual revenue, we concluded that 82% and 9% of firms are bent on the exploitation and exploration strategy.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.131-144
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• 2021

The organizational ambidexterity is an organizational strategy designed to pursue exploration activities to seize new opportunities and exploitation activities to efficiently use resources. Most of these ambidextrous structures have been studied for large corporations with slack resources, and there are still not many studies on the necessity of an ambidextrous structure for startups with relatively low-level resources. However, recently, the startup ecosystem is being advanced globally, and the amount of VC investment is rapidly increasing. This is a time when a lot of venture fund is invested in startups and a startup-friendly environment for rapid growth is created. This is the time to discuss the necessity and applicability of an ambidextrous organizational structure for startups. Therefore, this study conducted a hypothesis test whether the importance and necessity of balance that startups solving market problems with new ideas and utilizing accumulated resources have. To conduct this study, we analyzed 140 startups data gathered from the survey and the moderation effect was also analyzed. As a result of the study, it was verified that the balance of startup exploration and exploitation had a significant effect on startup performance, and the moderating effect of environmental dynamics was found to have a significant effect on the relationship with non-financial performance. Therefore, for startups with insufficient resources, it was concluded that the surplus resources generated in the process of a firm's growth should be effectively utilized and the balance between exploration and exploitation should be balanced from the initial stage of searching for a new business. In other words, it was confirmed that it is important for continuous growth and survival to seek the structure of an ambidextrous organization in order to internalize a mechanism that enables startups to pursue both effectiveness and efficiency in the long term. This study suggests a strategic direction for the growth of startups from the perspective of organizational structure. We expect that this meaningful results on the relationship between the ambidextrous capabilities of startups and performance contribute to the growth of startups in the rapidly growing startup venture environment.