Abstract
To foster innovation, firms must be able to access external knowledge from their customers and to assimilate and combine it with their internal knowledge. We draw upon research on organisational ambidexterity to assess the combined impact of internal and customer integration on the innovative capacity of the firm. We want to know if firms could foster their innovative capacity by strengthening their integration with customers and simultaneously improving internal integration. Using data from an international survey of 835 manufacturers in 20 countries, we test the potential of performance improvement of combined efforts on customer and internal integration.