Balancing Exploration and Exploitation - Designing a Staffing Tool to Leverage Ambidextrous Team Compositions

In an era of rapid technological disruption, organizations must increasingly balance the exploitation of existing capabilities with the exploration of innovative business models and technologies, a duality known as ambidexterity. While prior research has largely focused on ambidexterity at the organizational and individual levels, its operationalization at the team level, particularly within project contexts, remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by designing and evaluating a decision-support tool that enables structured, ambidexterity-informed staffing of project teams. The tool supports the scoping of business transformation projects, assesses the required balance between exploration and exploitation across different phases, and recommends team compositions aligned with these needs. Following a Design Science Research approach, the artifact was iteratively developed and refined through expert interviews, practitioner workshops, and a scholarly focus group. Additionally, we derive three design principles to guide the effective staffing of ambidextrous project teams and to support the development of information systems in ambidextrous contexts. This study advances ambidexterity research by identifying micro-mechanisms and phase-contingent requirements, linking these to concrete skill profiles through validated measurement, and demonstrating how organizations can embed evidence-based ambidextrous staffing into existing processes.