RIGHT OR LEFT: WHICH HAND DO I PLAY AS THE TIDE TURNS

Abstract

Entrepreneurship, previously seen as a subset of business for the small firms, is fast emerging to be a megatrend in the 21st century due to its capacity to reorder industries globally. Entrepreneurs are fast becoming the lifeblood of any economy by creating jobs, introducing new products and services and promoting upstream and downstream activities in the value chain. Indeed, small and
medium enterprises are playing a pivotal role in social and economic advancement. However, the entrepreneurship landscape in the 21st century is remarkably different and more turbulent than
the business environment of the past. The 21st century entrepreneur has to harness the opportunities that arise with technological changes like high speed internet, cloud technologies,
and growing social media coupled with changing organizational structures, ownership and management. This calls for a shift in entrepreneurship to a more technology based, collaborative
and adaptive business model that is more inclined towards growing profitable businesses and other social enterprises that add value beyond the traditional bottom line all within a radically
different entrepreneurial ecosystem. Due to this, entrepreneurship today revolves around entrepreneurs’ ability to deploy accumulated knowledge and stay in control of their business whileat the same time keeping abreast and adapting fast to changes in the environment. This implies that to excel, entrepreneurship today requires ambidexterity; the simultaneous ability to exploit
current internal capabilities and external opportunities and explore for new business opportunities that are yet to manifest. This conceptual paper, founded on the paradox theory argues that entrepreneurial ambidexterity is a must-have skill in the 21st century to enable the entrepreneur balance the contradicting motivations and logics to stay both aligned and adaptive.

Key Words: entrepreneurship, ambidexterity, exploration, exploitation, paradox theory