Impact of IT ambidexterity on new product development speed: theory and empirical evidence

New product development (NPD) speed is becoming an important weapon by which firms can gain market share in today's competitive and complex market environments, where consumer preferences change rapidly. Drawing on the information technology (IT)-enabled organizational capabilities perspective, this study proposes that IT ambidexterity—the simultaneous pursuit of IT exploitation and IT exploration, which has become imperative in modern industry to sustain the business value of IT—enhances NPD speed by facilitating operational agility. We examine the proposed relationship of IT ambidexterity with the potential moderating role of market complexity in a sample composed of 292 British high-tech firms. Our findings, based on a moderated-mediation analysis, suggest that the impact of IT ambidexterity on NPD speed is mediated by operational agility and that the mediation effect is especially pronounced in complex markets. The resulting theoretical arguments and empirical evidence yield further insights into the strategic impacts of IT.