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Organizational designs and innovation streams

Organizational designs and innovation streams This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firms ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams; incremental innovation in existing products as well as architectural and/or discontinuous innovation. Based on in-depth, longitudinal data on 13 business units and 22 innovations, we describe the consequences of organization design choices on innovation outcomes as well as the ongoing performance of existing products. We find that ambidextrous organization designs are relatively more effective in executing innovation streams than functional, cross-functional, and spinout designs. Further, transitions to ambidextrous designs are associated with increased innovation outcomes, while shifts away from ambidextrous designs are associated with decreased innovation outcomes. We describe the nature of ambidextrous organizational designstheir characteristics, underlying processes, and boundary conditions. More broadly, we suggest that the locus of integration and degree of structural differentiation together affect a firms ability to explore and exploit. We suggest that the senior teams ability to attend to and deal with contradictory internal architectures is a crucial determinant of a firms ability to exploit in the short term and explore over time. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Industrial and Corporate Change Oxford University Press

Organizational designs and innovation streams

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References (112)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved.
ISSN
0960-6491
eISSN
1464-3650
DOI
10.1093/icc/dtq040
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firms ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams; incremental innovation in existing products as well as architectural and/or discontinuous innovation. Based on in-depth, longitudinal data on 13 business units and 22 innovations, we describe the consequences of organization design choices on innovation outcomes as well as the ongoing performance of existing products. We find that ambidextrous organization designs are relatively more effective in executing innovation streams than functional, cross-functional, and spinout designs. Further, transitions to ambidextrous designs are associated with increased innovation outcomes, while shifts away from ambidextrous designs are associated with decreased innovation outcomes. We describe the nature of ambidextrous organizational designstheir characteristics, underlying processes, and boundary conditions. More broadly, we suggest that the locus of integration and degree of structural differentiation together affect a firms ability to explore and exploit. We suggest that the senior teams ability to attend to and deal with contradictory internal architectures is a crucial determinant of a firms ability to exploit in the short term and explore over time.

Journal

Industrial and Corporate Change – Oxford University Press

Published: Oct 8, 2010

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