Organizational Ambidexterity

members (Interview 5). Thus, LEO would benefit even further from having data knowledge in order to seed the community with data in a format that is appropriate for both the participants and LEO.

However, when acquiring this know-how, it is essential to acknowledge the importance and difficulty of creating new processes. Doing so within a new domain can be very time consuming, especially if handled by a single employee. For this reason, the competence should be on boarded early in the platform development process in order to help shape it in a manner that enables efficient data extraction and analysis, thereby allowing for valuable knowledge to be conceived.

User Involvement

Lastly, LEO needs competencies in regards to involving users in the process of continually designing the platform and attracting users to the platform. We believe LEO should outsource this competency, as their existing capabilities for undertaking such tasks is not available for establishing the community (Interview 5). There is no real need to internalize this competence, as it is a rather generic task that can be done by anyone with experience in the field. As long as they are introduced to the expected outcome, they will know themselves the way to get there. This is also in line with LEO’s need to optimize their internal operations by reducing fixed costs.

current business is beginning to stagnate and, therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue exploitation of their “own” market when patent expirations become a reality. Thus, the time has come for LEO to not only enhance their explorative measures, but also discover a cohesive way of balancing the two.

LEO’s first and second iteration platforms both help them in becoming more explorative, but they also help them balance and align the two, as they reflect the organizational ambidexterity of LEO.

On the current platform, participants are able to have their compounds tested in certain assays provided by LEO. The keywords here is “certain assays”, as this entails that the extent to which LEO can explore new opportunities is limited by the assays they themselves provide to the participants. Therefore, the opportunities for exploration are not completely open. In other words, they are not able to explore opportunities that do not fit within this exact scope, even though they might be of an interesting character. However, this should be viewed solely as a constraining limitation, as doing so enables LEO to exploit their existing business in new ways. The OI compound testing thus allows LEO to constitute the framework for innovation, as they themselves determine the targets for asset exploration, thereby steering and limiting the OI focus to exploration within their exploitative business.

Platform 2.0 presents LEO with the potential of exploring in a completely open manner. On the community part of the platform, LEO can even venture outside of their core areas of dermatological diseases. They can explore the opportunities presented on the platform from a distance, as all the value units shared in the community are in the form of information and, therefore, LEO does not have to actively engage in new, uncertain early stage innovation. Instead, LEO can passively absorb the value exchanged on the platform and comprehensively define the explorative opportunities, before eventually deciding to pounce and commit resources to embarking on a new exploratory initiative. The community therefore enables LEO to scan the changing environment in order to transform their organization for a competitive advantage. This is then achieved through value co-creation and helps LEO explore the opportunities presented by external partners.

In combination, both parts of the platform afford numerous beneficial abilities. One of them is the ability to optimize their sensing of new opportunities. Opportunities such as research trends can

be sensed at both parts of the platform. The same goes for sensing potential collaborative opportunities or exclusive partnerships, which they also both afford. Thus, it can be said that the community becomes an asset for LEO for discovering new paths, as it enables the facilitation of external linkages to specialists within the field. The data generated about participants, trends, science, and external collaborations can be translated into knowledge that helps LEO sense current trends in the market and instigate partnerships if relevant. This gives LEO a competitive edge, as it allows asset alignment with externals and collaboration to jointly deliver new treatments to patients.

Furthermore, the whole aspect of engaging in new initiatives enhances LEO’s ability to explore. The word ‘exploration’ entails exploring new opportunities and for each time LEO engages in explorative actions, they become more experienced at it. This experience is extremely important for an organization that is looking to improve their innovation capabilities. If able to utilize it for future scenarios of exploration, they will have better odds for seizing opportunities they sense in an increasingly changing environment. Such opportunities could for instance be found on the OI platform itself. The process of exploring through the platform, in addition to developing the platform itself, thus enables LEO to become better at continuously exploring opportunities through their experience with innovation and testing of business models.

The two different parts of the platform therefore complement one another, as they cohesively allow for LEO to continuously seek incremental and radical innovation simultaneously.

Independent Structure

According to theory, becoming an ambidextrous organization is often achieved by enforcing an independent structure, separating the explorative and exploitative business units, but with a tightly integrated senior management team. As of now, LEO’s OI department is what we describe as partially independent, as it is separated from the rest of the LEO’s core business possessing certain liberties which other subunits do not, e.g. being able to develop “open” contracts for attracting participants to their OI platform. However, the OI department still remains tied to the organization, as they rely on access to and utilization of LEO laboratories and employees to conduct the testing of compounds received from platform participants. The earlier mentioned unit of LEO iLab is an example of an internal business unit that is completely independent. iLab is able to make their own decisions as they possess a larger degree of freedom. This is due to the

believe that in order to create entrepreneurial surroundings that functions well within the fast-paced environment of digital technology development, the unit had to be independent from the rather rigid and bureaucratic processes of LEO.

Achieving the same degree of structural independence for the compound testing aspect of the platform is utopian at this stage. It is necessary to have access to LEO’s facilities, which would be very expensive for LEO to duplicate both in the form tangible physical facilities, as well the development of intangible competences just for the OI department alone. However, the community can and should strive to achieve the same degree of structural independence as the LEO iLab. As the community is a network consisting of mainly external participants, achieving the same degree of structural independence is a lot less resourceful to achieve than with the compound testing aspect. More importantly, the community should be fully independent, as it might otherwise present the image of an undesired bias in the form that LEO, as a large organization, potentially is seeking to steal ideas from the community solely for their own benefit. In addition, if LEO interferes too much with the growth of the community, it could present a distorted image of how the market is actually evolving, as it will not develop organically and independently. Instead, LEO should seek to achieve as high a degree of independence as possible for its community, as the potential apparent value grows in correlation.