• Product development
• Exploration
• Exploitation
• Domains
• Balance
• Ambidexterity
• Production

This thesis is the result of a research project carried out form September 2017 to March 2017 at the School of Management, at the University of York, UK. The developed research mainly focused on understand how medium-sized and large enterprises achieve ambidexterity, developing theoretical arguments that link financial performance to strategic combinations of exploration and exploitation in both product development and production domains. A conceptual model has been developed and tested through 341 collected questionnaires from Italian, Canadian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish and Hungarian firms. The results offer new insights for the ambidexterity challenge, opening interesting avenues for future research and validating a part of the conceptual model. (1) the pure strategy combining product development exploitation with production exploitation has negative effects on financial performance, (2) cross-functional ambidexterity combining product development exploration with production exploitation or production exploration with product development exploitation have positive complementary effects on financial performance.