Information Technology (IT) permits new organizational possibilities – tolerating and thriving in complex organizational settings that result from the election of conflicting strategic objectives. IT is a critical resource in today's knowledge-driven, hypercompetitive environment. Several indirect benefits of IT are accrued through intermediate value-creating organizational processes. Tolerating strategic tensions generated by competing demands on organizational attention and resources is one such process. The quest to attain competitive advantage through the concurrent pursuit of seemingly conflicting strategies is a major source of these tensions.

Many paradoxical challenges and strategic tensions arise from the conflicting requirements of exploration and exploitation. While prior research in information systems has considered exploitation and exploration strategies as mutually exclusive, recent work in the field of strategic management has established the simultaneous pursuit of exploration and exploitation strategies as a means of attaining competitive advantage. By nature, exploration and exploitation require fundamentally different, inconsistent and contradictory organizational settings, thus reflecting an instance of organizational ambidexterity. In this paper, we seek to showcase the intangible business value of IT by asserting the role of IT-enabled organizational ambidexterity in attaining superior competitive performance. We propose a theory to explain how IT software, technical and infrastructure resources facilitate ambidexterity. To test our model, we selected to gather data from 352 manufacturing firms in high growth sectors in India - a novel empirical setting. India is undergoing a period of accelerated growth, with rapidly evolving organizational challenges and opportunities. This provides an exemplar for the world’s enterprises undergoing rapid structural changes in the 21st century. India’s manufacturing sector, in particular, is characterized by high turbulence and hyper-competition. Firms in this environment concurrently pursue seemingly paradoxical strategies of exploitative and explorative innovation, an approach which simultaneously addresses needs of existing and emerging customers. While such ambidextrous behavior is theorized to grant a competitive advantage in stable, low growth markets, it is essential for the very survival of organizations in faster growing markets.