This study examines how resource acquisition timing affects a venture's ability to accelerate milestone achievement. We examine acquisition timing decisions for three types of resources: material resources, facilities and equipment resources, and human resources. Two venture milestones are examined: accomplishment of the first sale and achievement of positive cash flows. We theorize that resource acquisition timing can impact the degree of resource availability delays and the rate of resource-driven cash outflows/inflows, which, in turn, determine the time to first sale and the time to positive cash flows, respectively. Our results demonstrate that decisions concerning resource acquisition timing could have contradictory effects vis-à-vis shortening the time to first sale versus shortening the time to positive cash flows. These findings highlight the difficult tradeoffs that ventures have to navigate when making resource acquisition decisions, which have implications for multiple milestones across a venture's lifecycle. Finally, the paper demonstrates how technological novelty moderates, and, in fact, radically alters, the relationship between the timing of resource acquisitions and the time to venture milestone achievement.

This paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the paradox of ambidexterity. Specifically, we consider the role of prior success experience and prior failure experience on the effectiveness of future exploration and exploitation. Using a sample of 13,464 patents from the biomedical industry we demonstrate several features salient to understanding the paradox of ambidexterity. First, we demonstrate that exploration and exploitation have opposing impacts on innovation performance, while we also demonstrate a negative interaction effect between exploration and exploitation, which highlights the challenge of ambidexterity. We also show that prior success experience increases the likelihood of breakthroughs. On the other hand, we do not find support for a direct benefit of learning from failure. Interestingly, however, we demonstrate that prior failure experience and exploitation are both necessary, but not independently sufficient, for learning from failure to occur. Furthermore, we find that when pursuing exploration, accumulated prior failure experience can lead to an “exploration failure trap”. Collectively, our results illustrate that pursuing ambidexterity necessitates a delicate balancing act, in order to manage the short-term and long-term benefits, and perils, of exploration, exploitation, and learning from failure.

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