Does common institutional ownership promote ambidextrous innovation in firms?

This study investigates the relationship between common institutional ownership in Chinese A-share listed companies and ambidextrous innovation within the enterprise. Institutional investors are deeply embedded in specific industries, holding stakes in multiple companies within those sectors, thereby establishing common institutional ownership. The article attempts to explore the role mechanism of common institutional ownership on firms' exploratory and exploitative innovation from the perspectives of collaborative governance and self-interested collusion. The results show that the promotion effect of common institutional ownership on corporate ambidextrous innovation is significant. The results are still significant after testing by Heckman two-stage, PSM-DID, and other methods. It shows that common institutional ownership mainly promotes firms' exploitative innovation by reducing agency problems but does not promote exploratory innovation, and common institutional ownership can promote ambidextrous innovation by increasing the transparency of firms' information and thus promote ambidextrous innovation but cannot solve the equilibrium of ambidextrous innovation by doing so.