The Integration Mechanism Between Sci-Tech Innovation and Industrial Innovation in New-Type R&D Institutions: A Case Study from the Perspective of Dynamic Ambidextrous Capability

The deep integration of sci-tech and industrial innovation, rooted in the fusion of exploratory and exploitative ambidextrous capabilities, is a common global challenge. Traditional actors like enterprises and universities struggle due to the inherent imbalance of ambidextrous capability. Developed countries (e.g., Germany’s Fraunhofer, Finland’s VTT) have achieved integration through new-type research organizations, but rely on a “static coordination” model across departments ill-suited for rapidly changing, multi-logic environments. In contrast, China’s new-type R&D institutions (NTRI), emerging as innovative organizations, are naturally equipped to handle such institutional complexity and have become key drivers of deep integration. This study takes NTRI as a longitudinal single-case study object. Based on ambidextrous innovation theory and resource action theory, it constructs an analytical framework of “identifying integration challenges—addressing integration challenges—achieving integrated innovation” to explore how NTRI build dynamic ambidextrous capability through resource actions to drive the internal mechanism of integrating sci-tech innovation and industrial innovation. The results show that: (1) Accurately identifying integration breakpoints, bottlenecks, and hurdles at different development phases and establishing integration goals are key prerequisites for achieving integrated innovation; (2) the process of achieving integrated innovation is essentially a dynamic reconstruction of ambidextrous capability, involving resource bricolage to reconfigure demand-driven ambidextrous linking capability, utilizing resource orchestration to fission context-synchronized ambidextrous integration capability, and executing resource concerto to leapfrog networked symbiotic ambidextrous empowerment capability; and (3) the integrated innovation of NTRI at different phases exhibits a dynamic evolution, evolving from unidirectional spillover-integrated innovation to bidirectional interactive integrated innovation, and ultimately to empowering symbiotic integrated innovation.