a b s t r a c tWe elucidate the important, though complex, relationship between strategic flexibility and operational efficiency. We incorporate insights from the dynamic resource-based view, ambidexterity literature and managerial practice to explain how two ambidextrous operational capabilities, i.e., mass customization capability and innovative ambidexterity, fully mediate the relationship between strategic flexibility and operational efficiency. Using top-level executive data in India and the United States of America, our structural equation models show that ambidextrous operational capabilities link strategic flexibility and operational efficiency. While informing the debate on developing sustainable competitive advantage, we derive important theoretical and managerial implications for both operations management and strategic management.

The first candidates from the promising class of small non-antibody protein scaffolds are now moving into clinical development and practice. Challenges remain, and scaffolds will need to be further tailored toward applications where they provide real advantages over established therapeutics to succeed in a rapidly evolving drug development landscape.

Recent operations management and innovation management research emphasizes the importance of supplier integration. However, the empirical results as to the relationship between supplier integration and time‐to‐market are ambivalent. To understand this important relationship, we incorporate two major recent developments. First, the literature has started to redefine supplier integration into two dimensions, supplier product integration and supplier process integration. Second, recent research has begun to examine spillover effects that extend beyond the direct costs and benefits of the supplier contract. Using survey data of 116 firms in the industrials, health care, and information technology industries, the results confirm our hypotheses and show that supplier product integration decelerates time‐to‐market while supplier process integration accelerates time‐to‐market. The results also show a positive relationship between supplier integration and the adoption of external technologies, which either decelerates or accelerates time‐to‐market depending on the level of internal exploration activities. Our research, thus, helps to open the ‘black‐box’ of the relationship between supplier integration and time‐to‐market, and provides a theoretically grounded explanation to the apparent contradictory results in prior research about the influence of supplier integration on time‐to‐market. In addition, we contribute to research on spillover effects by emphasizing that information technology adoption and assimilation is an important spillover effect of supplier integration.

a b s t r a c tSupplier selection decisions are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. We draw upon the behavioral operations management and decision-making literatures to examine factors that lead to the adoption of procedural rationality as a decision strategy. In addition, we emphasize the effect of procedural rationality on decision-makers' perceived uncertainty and subsequent supplier decision performance. Our structural equation model with cross-country survey data from 461 respondents in the United States and China reveals that (i) organizational, situational, and personal antecedents significantly influence the use of procedural rationality, (ii) procedural rationality is effective in reducing uncertainty in supplier selection decisions, and (iii) the reduction in decision uncertainty improves supplier decision performance. We also emphasize contextual idiosyncrasies between China and the United States.