Michael L. Tushman

Ambidextrous Organizations: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change:

Organizations evolve through periods of incremental or evolutionary change punctuated by discontinuous or revolutionary change. The challenge for managers is to adapt the culture and strategy of their organizations to its current environment, but to do so in a way that does not undermine its ability to adjust to radical changes in that environment. They must, in other words, create an ambidextrous organization—one capable of simultaneously pursuing both incremental and discontinuous innovation.

Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited

We develop a contingency view of process managements influence on both technological innovation and organizational adaptation. We argue that while process management activities are beneficial for organizations in stable contexts, they are fundamentally inconsistent with all but incremental innovation and change. But dynamic capabilities are rooted in both exploitative and exploratory activities. We argue that process management activities must be buffered from exploratory activities and that ambidextrous organizational forms provide the complex contexts for these inconsistent activities to coexist.

Special Boundary Roles in the Innovation Process.

A version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Management meetings, August 1976. The author thanks his colleagues David Lewin, Noel Tichy, and Michael Ginzberg, and an anonymous reviewer forASQ for their helpful comments and criticism. This work was supported by grants from the Center for Research in Career Development at Columbia University and from the Shell Companies Foundation.

Organizing for Innovation

In todays business environment, there is no executive task more vital and demanding than the sustained management of innovation and change. Rapid changes in the marketplace make it essential to think in terms of the future. This article discusses the various types of innovation and focuses on how to organize for todays work while managing for tomorrows innovation. It also deals with the role of leadership—specifically, the relationship between executive leadership and innovation.

Managing Strategic Contradictions: A Top Management Model for Managing Innovation Streams

Sustained organizational performance depends on top management teams effectively exploring and exploiting. These strategic agendas are, however, associated with contradictory organizational architectures. Using the literature on paradox, contradictions, and conflict, we develop a model of managing strategic contradictions that is associated with paradoxical cognition-senior leaders and/or their teams (a) articulating a paradoxical frame, (b) differentiating between the strategy and architecture for the existing product and those for innovation, and (c) integrating between those strategies and architectures. We further argue that the locus of paradox in top management teams resides either with the senior leader or with the entire team. We identify a set of top management team conditions that facilitates a teams ability to engage in paradoxical cognitive processes.

Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance

Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through differentiation or through integration? Does ambidexterity occur at the individual or organizational level? Must organizations take a static or dynamic perspective on ambidexterity? Finally, can ambidexterity arise internally, or do firms have to externalize some processes? We provide an overview of the seven articles included in this special issue and suggest several avenues for future research.

Organizational Transformation as Punctuated Equilibrium: An Empirical Test

The punctuated equilibrium model of organizational transformation has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework for explaining fundamental changes in patterns of organizational activity. To date...

Process Management and Technological Innovation: A Longitudinal Study of the Photography and Paint Industries

This research explores the impact of process management activities on technological innovation. Drawing on research in organizational evolution and learning, we suggest that as these practices reduce variance in organizational routines and influence the selection of innovations, they enhance incremental innovation at the expense of exploratory innovation. We tested our hypotheses in a 20-year longitudinal study of patenting activity and ISO 9000 quality program certifications in the paint and photography industries. In both industries, the extent of process management activities in a firm was associated with an increase in both exploitative innovations that built on existing firm knowledge and an increase in exploitations share of total innovations. Our results suggest that exploitation crowds out exploration. We extend existing empirical research by capturing how process management activities influence the extent to which innovations build on existing firm knowledge. We suggest that these widely adopted organizational practices shift the balance of exploitation and exploration by focusing on efficiency, possibly at the expense of long-term adaptation.

Ambidexterity as a dynamic capability: Resolving the innovator's dilemma

Abstract How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents evidence suggesting that most organizations are largely inert and ultimately fail. A second perspective argues that some firms do learn and adapt to shifting environmental contexts. Recently, this latter view has coalesced around two themes. The first, based on research in strategy suggests that dynamic capabilities, the ability of a firm to reconfigure assets and existing capabilities, explains long-term competitive advantage. The second, based on organizational design, argues that ambidexterity, the ability of a firm to simultaneously explore and exploit, enables a firm to adapt over time. In this paper, we review and integrate these comparatively new research streams and identify a set of propositions that suggest how ambidexterity acts as a dynamic capability. We suggest that efficiency and innovation need not be strategic tradeoffs and highlight the substantive role of senior teams in building dynamic capabilities.

Social Network Analysis For Organizations

This article introduces the social network approach — its origins, key concepts, and methods. We argue for its use in organizational settings and apply the network approach in a comparative analysis of two organizations.