An Investigation of Organizational Ambidexterity Moderator Role in the Relationship between the Open Innovation and Entrepreneurial Orientation in Active Small & Medium Size Enterprises in (SME) Industrial Zone, Zahedan

In today's world, countries try to develop themselves against other countries and communities. Accordingly, they utilize powerful motivators like the entrepreneurship. The countries with the high entrepreneurship orientation seem to be more successful than the other countries. In such an unstable situation, making use of the available techniques in the entrepreneurship approach will provide even better success opportunities for the countries. Besides, small and medium-sized enterprises not only should they focused on the entrepreneurship, but also they should be alerted about how to benefit from the available resources and techniques. Therefore, in this relationship, organizational ambidexterity can be considered as a moderator variable. The present research follows descriptive-survey methodology. In this research, 79 companies out of 99 small and medium companies operating in the industrial town of Zahedan have been studied as a sample. The reliability and validity of the questionnaire was checked through SPSS 16 and Smart PLS 2.  The results of the study show that entrepreneurial alignment is effective in open innovation. Therefore, the main hypothesis of the research is confirmed. Finally, after examining the four main hypotheses of the research, it is concluded that in small and medium-sized, entrepreneurial orientation has a positive and significant effect on open innovation due to the mediating role of organizational ambiguity.

In today's societies, meet the changes in economic activities. One of these changes is the growth and expansion of countries' attention to the small and medium companies. For achieving a Production mutation, these companies need to move towards entrepreneurship in order to compete others in the market. Since these companies’ resources are limited, they are not able to manage some of their affairs alone, so they need to spend a lot of time and money. Therefore, in addition to keep pace with the rapid growth of the knowledge and the prosperity of technology, they must take actions towards open innovation. On the other hand, in addition to emphasizing innovative ideas and exploration, companies should be able to use the resources and knowledge available in the company in the best possible way. In such situations, managers need to use organizational ambidexterity. Organizational ambidexterity is the ability to use both hands with equal skill. Therefore, companies must use both exploitation and exploration activities simultaneously.

Case study

This research was conducted in the industrial town of Zahedan, which has 145 active units. These, 99 companies, according to the definition of the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade, have less than 50 employees, which are called small and medium companies. The sample size of this research through Cochran's formula is 79 units.

Theoretical framework

Open innovation is a management paradigm with the purpose of exploitation of knowledge inside and outside the company to create new products and services. Chesbrough )2006) defines open innovation as Goal-oriented use of internal and external knowledge to accelerate internal innovation and expand markets for external use of innovation. To achieve the operational concept of open innovation, three processes of internal-external, external-internal and a combination of both should be observed. Entrepreneurship as a driving force of economic and social development plays a key role in the development process of societies. Therefore, entrepreneurial trend is a general and sustainable orientation and represents the thoughts, tendencies and interests of companies towards entrepreneurship. The present study uses Lampkin and Des’ model in 1996, which is one of the most complete models that has investigated the dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation and includes five dimensions of risk-taking, innovation, aggressive competition, pioneering and independence. Due to economic and social conditions and rapid technological changes, organizations need to, in addition to using their existing capabilities, develop new and essential capabilities to compete in a dynamic environment. Therefore, we need to use a concept called organizational ambidextrousness. Duncan (1976), first, used the term organizational ambidexterity to describe the structural conflict between an organization's dual demands. Ambidexterity is an organizational capacity to the optimum achievement of two incompatible organizational goals. And the organization, while discovering new capabilities, make the most of existing capabilities at the same time. Therefore, two criteria of exploration and exploitation are used in this research. However, the research community is considered as small and medium companies. Because the government has always adopted special strategies and policies to promote small and medium industries in order to ensure competition in the free market and prevented members of the large companies to facilitate the entry of entrepreneurial companies into the field of economic.

The results show that entrepreneurial orientation has a positive and significant effect on open innovation in small and medium companyies. Entrepreneurial orientation has five dimensions. The study of the effect of each of these dimensions on open innovation is presented in the form of secondary hypotheses. Among of all, the dimension of “pioneering” (with the coefficient of 0.28) and the dimension of “independence” (with the coefficient of 0.24) have the most impact on open innovation. The study of entrepreneurial orientation on organizational ambidexterity shows that “leadership” (with the coefficient of 0.24) and “aggressive competition” (with the coefficient of 0.29) have the greatest impact on organizational ambivalence. In addition, organizational dualism directly explains 78% of the changes in the open innovation variable. Also, entrepreneurial orientation using the role of dual power mediator of 0.95 is effective on changes in open innovation.

The results of the present research hypotheses examining the effect of the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, open innovation and organizational ambiguity are positive and significant. Overall, the effect of the mediating role of ambidexterity on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and open innovation has been confirmed.Therefore, the managerial actions towards the creation of entrepreneurial orientation in the organization are functionalized through conduction the ambidexterity. Consequently, organizations achieve greater consistency and permanency that eventually leads to new knowledge and ideas. This will provide the accumulative creation of new knowledge and ideas among the organizations. According to the results, implications are proposed as: developing the opportunities to conduct research and maximizing entrepreneurship among employees.Negotiation of knowledge should be made for small companies in collaboration with large companies in order to take advantages of their modern technologies; managers should create the collaboration between the research department and the executive sections for identification of new knowledge and ideas and utilize the knowledge for setting their organizational goals reaching the optimum performance.