One of the most challenging tasks concerning innovation is to juggle the following two things: keeping your existing products thriving and pushing innovation for the future. In other words: How can one balance daily business and seminal development?
Researches at the Harvard Business School (Tushman et al.) have published a working paper some days ago that explores a positive relation between a specific way of organizing innovation and a successful outcome:
Ambidextrous organizational designs are those that sustain current success while simultaneously building new products, services, or processes. [...]
- [These designs] are composed of an interrelated set of competencies, cultures, incentives, and senior team roles.
- These designs are significantly more effective for serving innovation than are functional, cross-functional, and spinout designs.
- Business units that switched to an ambidextrous design improved their innovation outcomes while transitions to cross-functional or spinout designs did not.
- Ambidextrous designs for carrying out innovations helped the performance of existing products.
