In times of changing business environments, firms must constantly renew their competitive advantage by establishing dynamic capabilities. While often attempting to employ this in corporate venturing activities, they face the challenge of simultaneously exploring new and exploiting existing business opportunities. Examining possible approaches to mastering this feat of ‘organizational ambidexterity’ reveals an extensive but scattered picture. To better integrate this effort by assessing how corporate venturing is linked with organizational ambidexterity in the literature and identifying possible organizational setups, this systematic literature review builds on a sample of 172 studies. Based on different dimensions of dynamic capabilities, the analysis indicates that corporate venturing may take a solely explorative or an exploitative role, or balance both, to directly enable organizational ambidexterity, following a ‘trade-off’, respectively ‘paradox’, school of thought. As a result, this paper identifies four different setups of corporate venturing in an integrated framework, based on the ability and approach to enabling organizational ambidexterity. Here, the synthesis in the proposed framework of the studies examined allows differentiating between not directly ambidextrous separated or integrated corporate venturing and directly ambidextrous contextual or interlinked corporate venturing. As a novel contribution to the fields of strategic management, organizational change and corporate entrepreneurship, this integrated perspective suggests an often overlooked, potentially more strategic role for corporate venturing in the strategic renewal of a firm’s competitive advantage, thus building the basis for further empirical research on strategic corporate venturing approaches for organizational ambidexterity and their application in practice.

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To adapt their competitive advantages for successful strategic renewal, established companies must apply suitable innovation activities. One way to achieve this is the establishment of corporate venturing units that create organizationally consequential new business innovation for their parent company. However, the understanding of the distinctive organizational characteristics for such strategic corporate venturing is limited. To address this gap, our abductive study develops a conceptual organizational framework by linking key concepts of strategic renewal with corporate venturing. This framework is subsequently compared with insights emerging from the qualitative data of 29 corporate venturing units. This comparison allows us to define six types of units with different possible roles for the strategic renewal of the parent company, and a final exploratory organizational framework with distinctive organizational characteristics for strategic corporate venturing. These include a set of dynamic capabilities with corresponding resources as possible enablers for a planned innovation logic that requires interlinked-ambidextrous structures. These findings provide a foundation for an empirical model of strategic corporate venturing, as well as novel insights for establishing dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity within interlinked organizational entities. Practitioners can build on these findings to leverage corporate venturing units as a systematic and organized innovation activity for strategic renewal.

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