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Young firms and established firms have a tendency to emphasize one type of organizational learning to their detriment. This reduces organizational ambidexterity and makes them susceptible to failure. This study explores how two high-tech manufacturing firms use cost information from an accounting system to balance exploitation and exploration learning for ambidexterity. A successful growth firm and a revival firm are examined since both of these business life-cycle stages focus on a strategy of aggressive building. The evidence shows that the use of cost information to balance learning and achieve ambidexterity is different between a growth firm and revival firm. The use of cost information for exploitation and exploration is undertaken by taking each firm’s learning pre-disposition, pivoting organizational culture, and utilizing a functional structure to realize contextual and structural ambidexterity. This study provides preliminary models for future research on accounting and the organizational elements for achieving organizational ambidexterity.

Keywords: activity-based costing; ambidexterity; exploitation; exploration; variable costing