Within previous research on innovation management, the concept of ambidextrous organizations that allow the two different activities of exploration and exploitation with their different objectives and characteristics to coexist within an organization while being separated has been presented. Regardless of the fact that the relationship between exploration and exploitation differs depending on situations, existing literature does not consider these differences and therefore has only limited relevance and effectiveness. This paper focuses on the product substitutability of exploratory product and existing core products, proposes the cannibalistic and complementary types of ambidextrous organizations, and discusses effective management respectively. Then, through in-depth case study of Fujifilm, the paper illustrates how contingency framework of an ambidextrous organization will be effective for explaining the survival of Fujifilm in the emergence of digitalization. Thus, this paper aims to refine and enhance the concept of ambidextrous organization.

Along with the user innovation research having spread to a variety of fields, pioneering customer, which is called lead user, was regarded as someone who makes an innovation. This article attempts to critique and comment on Urban and von Hippel (1988) whose contributions are the followings; (1) identified the lead user for the first time, and (2) built a process to evaluate the product concept devised by the specified lead user and tested the concept that gained high evaluation from a third party. In addition, subsequent studies are reviewed to bring out questions as to whether the product concepts created by lead users are really superior.

This paper is based on the field investigations in Finland and Germany in August 2016. The first part depicts the “industry-university collaboration in Europe,” which are the cases of the innovation platform in Finland and the role of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in Germany. The second part describes how European companies could conduct strategic changing and reconstruct their organizations. Our investigation on Nokia shows how they could make a recovery after the mobile business sold to Microsoft. Our study on R&D organizations of Siemens illustrates how they would manage to create business opportunities in the era of Industry 4.0 and IoT (Internet of Things).