The integration of exploration and exploitation in the context of innovation teams: fostering and leveraging paradoxical tensions

This doctoral research was conducted in the context of Cranfield’s Executive DBA program. The central theme running through each of the three papers that constitute the core of this thesis is the integration of exploration and exploitation in the context of innovation teams. The first paper is a systematic literature review of the mechanisms used to integrate exploration and exploitation at multiple levels of the organization. Based on the findings from this review, the concept of “integrative capacity” is introduced and related propositions are developed. The second and third papers are empirical studies that examine different parts of Smith and Lewis’s (2011) dynamic equilibrium model of tension management. The first is a quantitative study of 42 innovation teams. Its primary objective is to develop and validate hypotheses about optimal team configurations. Specifically, the study looks at the distribution of paradox mindsets within teams and its impact on the innovativeness of project outputs. The second is an exploratory, qualitative study of 16 senior innovation leaders working in large multinational organizations across different industries. It identifies the types of tensions that surface in the process of developing new products or services, describes the resolution strategies used to deal with these tensions, and infers causal relationships between the use of particular resolution strategies and their propensity to embed tensions in the context of new product development projects. Together, these papers contribute primarily to paradox theory and, more specifically, to our understanding of how exploration and exploitation can be brought together in valuable ways in the context of innovation teams. Importantly, despite their unique perspectives and different methodologies, all three papers suggest that the synergistic integration of exploration and exploitation rests on two distinct and complementary sets of factors: those that foster and those that leverage paradoxical tensions