Abstract: Ambidexterity and punctuated equilibrium are major modes for enterprises to balance exploration and exploitation innovation. The enterprises need to select the appropriate one for a short-term and long-term survival and development. This paper discusses the impact of absorptive capacity and openness on the innovation balance mode selection from the perspective of knowledge acquisition. By text analysis, we extract information from the annual reports of 260 listed companies in the information technology industry and the electronics manufacturing industry, machinery industry and the pharmaceutical and biotech instrumentation products industry, to measure innovation balanced mode. We also test our hypothesis by hierarchical regression. The result shows that absorptive capacity helps enterprises to obtain the knowledge required by innovation from outside. The high absorption capacity enterprise who selects ambidexterity can achieve higher performance than those select punctuated equilibrium. Openness also helps enterprises to obtain external knowledge to make up their lack of knowledge. The enterprise who selects ambidexterity can achieve higher performance than those select punctuated equilibrium in a high degree of openness. On the contrary, enterprise who selects punctuated equilibrium can achieve higher performance in a lower degree of openness.