Coordinator: Konstantinos Andriopoulos, Cass Business School, City U. London
Participant: Sebastian Raisch, GSEM - U. of Geneva
Participant: Loizos Th. Heracleous, U. of Warwick
Participant: Jonathan Schad, U. of Geneva
Participant: Manto Gotsi, U. of Westminster
Participant: Marianne W. Lewis, Cass Business School, City U. London
Participant: Justin J.P. Jansen, Erasmus U. Rotterdam
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| Ambidextrous organizations excel at exploiting existing products to enable incremental innovation while exploring new opportunities to foster radical innovation. Balancing exploitation and exploration enables superior long term-performance, even survival, yet raises challenging tensions, such as between change and stability and past and future. Tensions are the starting point for the burgeoning literature on organizational paradoxes. Defined as “persistent contradiction between interdependent elements” (Schad, Lewis, Raisch & Smith, 2016, p. 6), paradox embeds rich nuances and complexity. We are interested in unpacking and discussing future research avenues that delve deeper on integrated approaches that leverage synergies between exploitation and exploration (e.g. Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009; Raisch, Birkinshaw, Probst & Tushman, 2009) and further investigate how paradox can fuel virtuous cycles as organizations learn to survive and/or thrive through innovation tensions (e.g. Smith & Tushman, 2005; Smith, 2014). As the community of scholars applying paradox theory to tensions in managing exploitation and exploration, past and future, and stability and change is increasing, we believe that this interactive PDW will inspire complementary, synergistic and cumulative insights into future studies. To do so, this timely PDW will include: panelists offering theory and empirical research adopting a paradox lens to investigate ambidexterity; a facilitated discussion inviting PDW participants to consider paradox theory as a means to help elucidate the nature and responses of exploitation-exploration tensions; and an open discussion collectively exploring how a paradox lens can deepen insights on organizational ambidexterity, while also uncovering how ambidexterity can extend our understanding of paradox. Building on other successful PDWs on paradoxes in the last four years (that have attracted 75-100 participants), we envision that this discussion will continue to enrich and extend paradox theory and ambidexterity. |