Dealing with the tension between explorative and exploitative activities is a key issue for firms, especially for multinational enterprises (MNEs) (Birkinshaw and Gupta, 2013). Literature suggests that ambidexterity allows firms to manage this issue properly (Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004) and provides firms with specific competitive advantages ( Junni et al., 2013; Ferraris, 2014). However, usually achieving ambidexterity is difficult and risky because firms do not manage explorative and exploitative activities properly and because they do not have resources and competencies to do that steadily (Simsek, 2009; Prieto et al., 2009; Adler and Heckscher, 2013). In such a case, ambidexterity might be more successful if developed through alliances and networks (Kang et al., 2007; Vrontis et al., 2017). In this guise, looking at literature on open innovation and alliances, inter-organizational linkages play a key role in strengthening and complementing firms’ exploration and exploitation agendas (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009; Mortara and Minshall, 2011; Santoro, 2017; Vrontis et al., 2017). Furthermore, open innovation literature stressed the importance of the so-called coupled model that allows firms to co-operate with other organizations in strategic networks combining knowledge acquisition processes (exploration) with knowledge transfer processes (exploitation) (Gassmann and Enkel, 2004; Chesbrough et al., 2014). As a result, firms that manage the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation while being engaged in alliances achieve higher performance (Lavie and Rosenkopf, 2006; Lavie et al., 2011; Vrontis et al., 2017). The management of exploration and exploitation has been deeply studied in several papers (Augier and Thanning Vendelø, ۱۹۹۹; Lavie et al., 2010), but from the existent literature, it emerges a lack of studies regarding a recent context of analysis, the smart city one (a notable exception is Ferraris, Erhardt and Bresciani, 2017) considered a great locus of innovation where firms establish alliances to test new business models and technologies (Hollands, 2008; Paskaleva, 2011; Tardivo et al., 2017).