This paper addresses the challenge that firms face in pursuing organizational ambidexterity because of the tendency for firm exploitation to crowd out firm exploration. Overcoming this challenge, this paper outlines why and how firm exploitation promotes its future exploration in the context of the firm’s product innovation process. March’s (1991) exploration-exploitation choice multitheoretical perspectives are employed to identify exploration and exploitation as distinct innovation learning processes that produce unique innovation outcomes: exploration creates product invention while exploitation generates product adoption and product innovation. This paper explains why firms choose to invest in either future exploration or future exploitation, and how experiential learning gained through exploitation is transformed, through the knowledge evolution cycle of variation, selection, replication and retention within the product innovation process, into knowledge/experience needed for future exploration. This paper contributes to organizational learning and innovation theories in three ways by: (1) demonstrating that March’s multitheoretical perspectives provide a rich context for identifying the series of strategic innovation decisions and intraorganizational pathway that explain why and how firm exploitation promotes its future exploration, thus facilitating development of organizational ambidexterity; (2) highlighting exploitation’s experiential learning and the knowledge evolution cycle as the necessary condition for transforming experience into knowledge/experience required for exploration and achieving organizational ambidexterity; and (3) emphasizing investment of firm resources in absorptive capacity relative to complementary assets as the sufficient condition for developing such knowledge/experience and maintaining organizational ambidexterity. This paper contributes to ambidexterity scholarship by reconciling four tensions cited by scholars as impeding further ambidexterity research.