How Do Ambidextrous Teams Create New Products? Cognitive Ambidexterity, Analogies, and New Product Creation

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.1499
• Author: Päivi Karhu,Paavo Ritala,Loredana Viola
• Published date: 01 January 2016
• Date: 01 January 2016

■Research Article

How Do Ambidextrous Teams Create

New Products? Cognitive Ambidexterity,

Analogies, and New Product Creation

Päivi Karhu

1

*, Paavo Ritala

1

and Loredana Viola

2

1

Lappeenranta University of Technology

2

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria

For long-term survival, companies must master both exploitative and explorative knowledge processes in new prod-

uct creation (NPC). Cognitive ambidexterity refers to the NPC team’s ability to successfully combine exploration and

exploitation. However, insights on how cognitive ambidexterity is achieved in NPC processes are scarce. This study

adopts one promising approach, the use of analogies and analogical thinking, as knowledge processes that help to

achieve cognitive ambidexterity in NPC. The first empirical results in this paper confirm that the utilization of near,

medium-far, and far analogies in NPC processes facilitates the development of both radically and incrementally

new products. The results show that creation of favorable conditions for analogies to born, team composition and con-

figuration matter when pursuing utilization of analogies for cognitive ambidexterity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION

The challenges of the cur rent business environment

require companies to maint ain customer satisfac-

tion by providing improvements to their existing

products and recognizing ne w business opportuni-

ties or trends worth follow ing while also creat-

ing unique products to att ract new customers and

widen their market share. This challenge is

enforced by the typical te ndency of established

businesses to lock in to cu rrent technological and

product trajectories (Tripsas and Gavett i, 2000).

Thus, companies are faced with an ambidexterity

problem—the simultaneo us need to exploit and

explore knowledge in the ir product development

and innovation activities (Bledow et al., 2009;

Revilla et al., 2010; Lin and McDono ugh, 2014).

Academic literature of ten refers to the organiza -

tional tensions, dilemmas, or paradoxes und er the

umbrella term “ambidexterity,”wherein businesses

engage in opposing or con flicting tasks through

individual- or group-le vel cognition or vi a

behavioral or organiza tional arrangements (Smith

and Tushman, 2005).

Research on innovation amb idexterity provides

evidence of innovation being su pported through

organizational structures (Taylor and Helfat, 2009;

Chang et al., 2011), management of the related ten-

sions (Andriopoulos a nd Lewis, 2009), and team-

and individual-level l earning (Lin et al., 2013; Lin

and McDonough, 2014). However, there is still a

lack of micro-foundatio nal, knowledge process-

level insights on how ambi dexterity can be practi-

cally achieved in new product creation (NPC)

processes. Despite the immense attention the amb i-

dexterity phenomenon has received during the pas t

decade in academic liter ature, very few scholars

expound on the knowled ge processes that enable

businesses to become amb idextrous in an NPC

context.

To bridge this research gap, this study integr ates

the insights from several rec ent conceptualizations

on cognitive ambidexte rity and cognitive frames

(Smith and Tushman, 2005; Chandrasekaran, 20 09;

Greenberg et al., 2011, 2013; Lin and McDonough ,

2014). This study portray s cognitive ambidexterity

on a team level as the combi nation of exploitative

and explorative knowled ge processes. In examin-

ing cognitive ambidexterity, this paper adopts a

dialectical perspective on innovation that focuses

*Correspondence to: Päivi Karhu, Lappeenranta University of

Technology, LUT School of Business and Management. 34,

53850 Lappeenranta Lappeenranta Finland 53851.

E-mail: paivi.karhu@lut.fi

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 23 Number 1 pp 3–17 (2016)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1499

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.