• First Name

    Philipp

  • Last Name

    Wagner

  • Affiliation

    RWTH Aachen University, Technology and Innovation Management Group

  • (Preliminary) PhD Title

    Ambidexterity for innovation – a contextual- and individual-level perspective

  • PhD abstract

    Recent scholarship suggests that companies need to be ambidextrous in order to achieve superior (innovation) performance (He/Wong 2004; Jansen et al. 2005). Ambidexterity is suggested to be achieved by structural separation (Tushman/o’Reilly 1996). However, the separation idea has not remained without contention. Gibson and Birkinshaw (2004) suggest that firms should rather build contextual ambidexterity – e.g. a context which allows employees to act ambidextrous within one and the same firm or unit. Until today, there is however little insight on how contextual ambidexterity can be achieved. My dissertation will investigate organizational ambidexterity for innovation on the contextual and individual-level, thus also heeding a recent call to introducing a micro-level perspective in management research (Foss et al. 2005).