Michael L. Tushman

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Business School

Management research has increasingly explored the domains of ecosystems, platforms, and open/user/distributed innovation - governance structures focused on engaging with external communities. While these research areas include substantial empirical and theoretical work and share notable similarities, the literature streams have evolved separately l...

Research Summary Why do incumbent firms frequently reject non‐incremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team’s (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an innovation’s categorical boundaries and to cast the innovation as...

Open innovation processes promise to enhance creative output, yet we have heard little about successful launches of new technologies, products, or services arising from these approaches.We believe we’ve hit on an important hidden factor for this failure and that it holds the key to a successful integration and execution of open innovation methods.

Incumbent firms face steep challenges in dealing with technological change and associated innovation streams. The firm’s senior leadership team, and especially R&D leadership, plays a central role in shaping a firm’s ability to both exploit existing capabilities and explore new technological domains.

Technical change is one of the core drivers of organizational fates. While technological change accentuates organizational failure rates, there is substantial heterogeneity in organizational life chances. Some firms thrive during eras of ferment, other firms proactively destabilize their product class with technological discontinuities, even as mos...

Platform, open/user innovation, and ecosystem strategies embrace and enable interactions with external entities. Firms pursuing these approaches conduct business and interact with environments differently than those pursuing traditional closed strategies. This chapter considers these strategies together highlighting similarities and differences bet...

Paul R. Lawrence was one of the earliest and most influential figures in the emergence of organizational behavior as a field of study. He was a pioneer in creating a body of work on organization design, leadership, and change in both the private and public sectors. Lawrence’s professional work was rooted in an aspiration to do work that was rigorou...

The purpose of this article is to suggest a (preliminary) taxonomy and research agenda for the topic of “firms, crowds, and innovation” and to provide an introduction to the associated special issue. We specifically discuss how various crowd-related phenomena and practices—for example, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, user innovation, and peer producti...

Paul R. Lawrence was one of the earliest and most influential figures in the emergence of organizational behavior as a field of study. He was a pioneer in creating a body of work on organization design, leadership, and change in both the private and public sectors. Lawrence’s professional work was rooted in an aspiration to do work that was rigorou...

Large companies initiate many new businesses, but few of them reach scale. The ambidexterity literature describes how companies create exploratory businesses, but says little about how they subsequently scale these businesses. The strategy literature uses real option theory to explain the transition to scale, but does not consider the complex relat...

Michael Tushman, the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration and chair of the Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School, talks about the challenges of managing breakthrough innovation in established companies. According to him, the fundamental idea, which has been around in the innovation field fo...

This article reflects on our 2003 article, "Exploitation, Exploration, and Process Management: The Productivity Dilemma Revisited, " which received the Academy of Management Review's Best Article Award in 2003 and Decade Award in 2013. We consider the context within which we wrote the original article, with particular reference to the theoretical,...

Scholars and practitioners have recently focused on the possibilities associated with more “open” forms of governance and innovation. The purpose of this proposed panel symposium is to take stock of this movement toward increased openness. Each of the panelists will discuss the what, why (and why not), when and how of open governance and innovation...

Innovation traditionally takes place within an organization's boundaries and with selected partners. This Chandlerian approach is rooted in transaction costs, organizational boundaries, and information challenges. Information processing, storage, and communication costs have been an important constraint on innovation and a reason why innovation tak...

Today’s organizations are increasingly experimenting with crowdsourcing for innovation as a way to source new fresh ideas. However, there is much mystery and little evidence on the impact of such ideas on organizations. For one, new ideas may clash against old ideas — a well-known “Not Invented Here” (NIH) phenomenon. Secondly, organizations may no...

The ability of organizations to innovate and adapt to changes in the external environment is a critical component of competitive success. Research on incumbent firm adaptation has historically focused on the importance of developing new capabilities; increasingly, scholars are highlighting that adaptation also requires shifts in organizational char...

Organizational ambidexterity refers to the ability of an organization to both explore and exploit — to compete in mature technologies and markets where efficiency, control, and incremental improvement are prized and to also compete in new technologies and markets where flexibility, autonomy, and experimentation are needed. In the past 15 years ther...

Homophily in social relations results from both individual preferences and selective opportunities for interaction, but how these two mechanisms interact in large, contemporary organizations is not well understood. We argue that organizational structures and geography delimit opportunities for interaction such that actors have a greater level of di...

This article provides conceptual foundations for analyzing organizations comprising multiple legally autonomous entities, which we call meta-organizations. We assess the antecedents of the emergence of such collectives and the design choices they entail. The article identifies key parameters on which such meta-organizations' designs differ from eac...

This article develops and tests a model of how organizational structure influences organizational performance. Organizational structure, conceptualized as the decision‐making structure among a group of individuals, is shown to affect the number of initiatives pursued by organizations and the omission and commission errors (Type I and II errors, res...

In this study, we analyze how the organizational architecture of a multibusiness firm affects the adaptation of its constituent business units. Using an inductive analysis of GE's governance system from 1951 to 2001, we examine how the integration of corporate and business unit attention occurs within and across the firm's governance channels. Our...

Researchers' primary concern with respect to the information processing perspective has been to understand how structural features influence the organization's ability to draw upon and utilize information for resolving problems, ignoring the primary role of individuals as the information processors within the organization. To shed light on this iss...

We take a network perspective to organizational architecture, conceptualizing it as multiple networks of both formal and informal interactions and argue that their interplay is key to better understanding individual organizational member performance. We develop and test the concept of network consistency as the overlap between the informal network...

This article explores how knowledge embodied in executives is tied to the organizational context in which it develops. Drawing on the knowledge‐based view of the firm and human capital theory, we predict that executives will move between units with similar ‘structural composition’—a characteristic representing unit origin (as acquired or internally...

Abernathy's (1978) empirical work on the automotive industry investigated relationships among an organization’s boundary (all manufacturing plants), its organizational design (fluid vs. specific), and its ability to execute product and/or process innovations. Abernathy's ideas of dominant designs and the locus of innovation have been central to sch...

This paper contrasts traditional, organization-centered models of innovation with more recent work on open innovation. These fundamentally different and inconsistent innovation logics are associated with contrasting organizational boundaries and organizational designs. We suggest that when critical tasks can be modularized and when problem-solving...

Abernathy's (1978) empirical work on the automotive industry investigated relationships among an organization’s boundary (all manufacturing plants), its organizational design (fluid vs. specific), and its ability to execute product and/or process innovations. Abernathy's ideas of dominant designs and the locus of innovation have been central to sch...

Positively deviant organizations are sustainable, achieving organizational peak performance today while creating the conditions to thrive tomorrow. We argue that organizational sustainability depends on attending to strategic paradox, simultaneously engaging contradictory yet interrelated strategies. Drawing on our research and the work of others,...

In 2005, Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Zensar, a Pune, India-based software company, and his senior management team are considering consolidating staff and resources at the firms. Natarajan proposes an additional, possible controversial business unit to the proposed new structure. The additional unit would explore new markets for the firm's promising in...

In this article, we analyze how one organization, GE Money Bank in Switzerland, successfully created a new growth business through ambidextrous leadership and discuss the related challenges for business and HR leaders. GE Money is a business division of General Electric Co., one of the world’s largest and most admired corporations. As a global prov...

Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity the ability of senior managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration of existing assets to overcome inertia and path dependence, is a core dynamic cap...

Although most managers publicly acknowledge the need to explore new businesses and markets, the claims of established businesses on company resources almost always come first, especially when times are hard. When top teams allow the tension between core and speculative units to play out at lower levels of management, innovation loses out. At best,...

Homophily is perhaps the most robust empirical regularity describing the structure of social relations. While we know that homophily results from both individual preference and uneven opportunity, there is little empirical research describing how these two mechanisms interact to affect the structure of intra- organizational networks. We argue that...

The M-Budget Card case study is about mastering the challenges of an exploratory strategic initiative in a context marked by time pressure and frequent change. M-Budget was the first of a series of highly successful projects that established GE Money Bank as a leader in the Swiss credit card market. The business concept was to cooperate with the co...

This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firm's ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams; incremental innovation in existing products as well as architectural and/or discontinuous innovation. Based on in-depth, longitu...

Organizations struggle to balance simultaneous imperatives to exploit and explore, yet theorists differ as to whether exploitation undermines or enhances exploration. The debate reflects a gap: the missing mechanism by which organizations break free of old routines and discover new ones. We propose that the missing link is perturbation: novel stimu...

Jim March's framework of exploration and exploitation has drawn substantial interest from scholars studying phenomena such as organizational learning, knowledge management, innovation, organizational design, and strategic alliances. This framework has become an essential lens for interpreting various behaviors and outcomes within and across organiz...

As our world becomes more global, fast paced and hypercompetitive, competitive advantage may increasingly depend on success in managing paradoxical strategies - strategies associated with contradictory, yet integrated tensions. We identify several types of complex business models organizations will need to adopt if they are to host such paradoxical...

We constantly hear of the increasing complexity of our fast-paced, globalized world, and those who did not survive the succession of crises of the last decade could certainly attest to the difficulties of strategy-making in such circumstances. Of course, our reflex when confronted with fear of the future is often to run for cover, particularly if m...

Sustained organisational performance depends on top management teams effectively exploring and exploiting. These strategic agendas are, however, associated with contradictory organisational architectures. Using the literature on paradox, contradictions and conflict, we develop a model of managing strategic contradictions that is associated with par...

In this volume, Palmer et al. and Miller et al. take different approaches to assessing the relevance debate in organizational studies. After commenting on these papers, we recommend that a “full-cycle” approach to conducting research can help organizational scholars increase the relevance of their work. We then describe how key elements of this app...

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...

The empirical evidence is that only a tiny fraction of organizations live to age 40. Why this should be is a puzzle, since when firms are doing well they have all the resources (financial, physical, and intellectual) to continue to be successful. Yet the evidence is that most organizations fail. Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary theory, th...

Editor's note The authors of this paper presented an All-academy session at the 2008 Academy of Management annual meeting in Anaheim, California. We were excited by the dynamic nature of the debate and felt that it related closely to critical issues in the areas of operations management, strategy, product development and international business. We...

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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 shif...

This is a descriptive study of the structure of communications in a modern organization. We analyze a dataset with millions of electronic mail messages, calendar meetings and teleconferences for many thousands of employees of a single, multidivisional firm during a three-month period in calendar 2006. The basic question we explore asks, what is the...

Idea brokers are good at sparking cross-divisional innovation through their broad social networks. But implementation - marshaling resources and getting various stakeholders on board - requires dense webs of strong interpersonal relationships.

Organizations experience intense pressure to exploit their existing knowledge and capabilities. However, exploitation tends to drive out exploration and render organizations rigid and inflexible. Hence the paradox of the highly disciplined organization: exploitation leads to success in the short term, but undermines survival in the long term. Many...

Multidivisional firms often fail to take advantage of innovations that involve combining resources from distinct divisions. This failure of cross-line-of-business innovation is a consequence of design choices employed to execute the firm's strategy: in organizing around its core businesses, the firm renders interdependence between divisions residua...

As professional schools, business schools aspire to couple research rigor with managerial relevance. There has been, however, a concern that business schools are increasingly uncoupled from practice and that business school research lacks real-world relevance. This relevance-rigor gap affects the quality of our teaching as well as the institutional...

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF RIGOR AND RELEVANCE What is the role of research in business schools, and how is it different from the role of research in disciplinary departments? Donald Stokes, in Pas-teur's Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (1997), suggested that the classic dis-tinction between "basic" research (performed with-out pract...

In the past 15 years, the IBM Company has undergone a remarkable transformation from a struggling seller of hardware to a successful broad range solutions provider. Underlying this change is a story of foresighted strategy and disciplined execution—of connecting knowing to doing. In strategic terms, the IBM transformation illustrates the ideas behi...

This article offers a lively and spirited debate on the pros and cons of relating research to practice. The authors' goal is to illuminate fundamental issues in the debate in detail, consider a variety of prescriptions, and then come to a mindful conclusion about a course of action. The article begins with a point—counterpoint debate to make sure t...

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 shif...

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the destiny of the firm is closely linked to the evolution of product class in the industry and show that product-class evolution is driven by the variation, retention and selection of dominant designs in the context of lumpy markets. The paper demonstrates that business strategy decisions cannot be undert...

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 pa...

We now have the research-based insights and tools to help firms to both innovate and exploit today's success, as well as explore into the future to sustain tomorrow's success. We have deep insights into managerial and organizational dynamic capabilities. Our field has the tools to help managers diagnose to roots of engineering and innovation pathol...

Corporate executives must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future. This mental balancing act is one of the toughest of all managerial challenges--it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently...

We develop a contingency view of process management's 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...

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 inno...

We take a structural approach to assessing innovation. We develop a comprehensive set of measures to assess an innovation's locus, type, and characteristics. We find that the concepts of competence destroying and competence enhancing are composed of two distinct constructs that, although correlated, separately characterize an innovation: new compet...

This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firm's ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams; incremental innovation in existing products as well as architectural and/or discontinuous innovation. Based on in-depth, longitu...

We develop a contingency view of process management's 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...

The article discusses the issue of time as it pertains to organizational research. The author believes that looking at research in terms of time is a powerful tool in assessing organizational phenomena. According to the author, temporal research allows researchers to gain more perspective when looking at organizational issues such as decision makin...

Economists and organization theorists have asked which factors are linked to the rate at which firms exit an industry. Yet little research has linked exit rates to changes over time in the key dimensions which characterize an industry's environment. This study examines linkages between exit rates and changing levels of uncertainty, munificence and...

There are elements of today's organization design that are timeless, but there are also new strategic imperatives that flow from the reshaped environment that will raise design issues for the organization of the future. The authors point out that the environment will continue to drive the strategic architecture or an enterprise and the variety of w...

The concept of dominant designs has been used in very different ways. Confusions exist over the concept, its underlying causal mechanisms, and its level of analysis. To remove these confusions, we draw on the history of technology and propose to conceptualize technologies as nested hierarchies of subsystems and components.

We explore how interorganizational networks coevolve with technology in the modern flight simulation industry. Since industries characterized by complex technologies, like flight simulation, rely on cooperative groups such as technical committees, task forces, and standards bodies to adjudicate the process of technological evolution, we focus on th...

The work on dominant designs and their linkage to organizational evolution was initiated by Abernathy (1978) and Abernathy and Utterback (1978). Over the past 20 years the concept has been used by a range of authors in a variety of ways. Confusion over the concept, its underlying causal mechanisms, and its level of analysis renders research in this...

Las empresas consolidadas pueden desarrollar innovaciones radicales y, además, proteger sus actividades. El secreto está en crear unidades organizativamente distintas que estén estrechamente integradas en el ámbito de la alta dirección

This article is based on Professor Tushman's well-received presentation at the 1997 international trategic leadership conference in Washington, D.C., in April

If the defining goal of modern-day business can be isolated to just one item, it would be the search for competitive advantage. Competition is more intense than ever-technological innovation, consumer expectations, and government deregulation all combine to create more opportunities for new competitors to change the basic rules of the game. At the...