A firm’s embedding structures in a technology competition network can influence its propensity for innovation ambidexterity. Using PCT (patent cooperation treaty) patent data of wind energy companies between 2010 and 2019, we adopted social network analysis and fixed-effects panel negative binomial regression to examine the impacts of network structural features on firm innovation ambidexterity. The results show that competitor-weighted centrality contributes to a firm’s propensities for both incremental and radical green innovation. In contrast, a firm’s embeddedness in small-world clusters can moderate the effect of the firm’s competitor-weighted centrality positively on its incremental innovation but negatively on its radical innovation. The study makes three theoretical contributions. First, it enriches the understanding of how the competition network affects innovation ambidexterity. Second, it provides new insights into the relationship between competition network structures and technology innovation strategy. Finally, it contributes to bridging the research on the social embeddedness perspective and green innovation literature. The findings of this study have important implications for enterprises in the wind energy sector regarding how competitive relationships affect green technology innovation. The study underscores the importance of considering the competitiveness of a firm’s rivals and the embedded structural features when devising green innovation strategies.

Space 4.0—marked by commercialization, modular technologies, actor diversification, and intensifying geopolitical competition—has lowered barriers to participation while relocating hierarchy into supply chains, platforms, standards, and commercial infrastructure. This conceptual analysis asks how, and under what geopolitical conditions, small and middle powers (SMPs) convert technological specialization, market embeddedness, and normative positioning into selective strategic autonomy. Using analytic eclecticism, the article, by integrating Science and Technology Studies (STS), International Political Economy (IPE), and constructivism, distinguishes strategic agency—the capacity to act purposively under constraint—from strategic autonomy—the contingent outcome of preserving meaningful options and limiting determinative dependence. The framework identifies three corresponding practices: niche specialization, which converts selective technological capability into capability leverage; agile hedging, which uses procurement, supply-chain positioning, and institutional diversification to create bargaining leverage; and norm entrepreneurship, which converts legitimacy and rule-making participation into influence. The evidentiary base is a structured synthesis of scholarship and purposively selected illustrations from South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, with India and the European Union used as boundary comparators. The analysis argues that autonomy emerges when capability, bargaining, and legitimacy leverage are strategically coupled, but that the same coupling can deepen upstream dependence, security exposure, or implementation gaps. It further proposes competitive pluralism as a boundary condition: SMP room for manoeuvre is greatest when great-power rivalry creates credible alternatives without hardening into closed blocs. The article therefore recasts secondary-state agency in high-technology geopolitics as the capacity to organize and recalibrate interdependence rather than escape it.