which will allow us to spot a time-based trend in the evolvement of explorative and exploitative activities. The OAS is found in a mix between an interview with Maria, the former project manager (annex 1), and my own daily observations. Obviously it is difficult to put an exact number on exactly how explorative a year is, and the quantification is only done to be able to see the relative difference between the years and map out trends.
This dual pressure from the beginning can also be seen in communication manager Søren Hanagers comments when interviewed on the beginning of Campus. According to him (annex 2) Campus needed to produce 600 sales already the first year even though he was fully aware that Maria also needed to create the market in the first place. Maria herself (annex 1) elaborates on that by saying that she did however have the first six months free with no specific goals to allow her to search for the best angle before the goals of 600 sales were put together.
Having to secure 600 sales in a newly created market on such a short time frame could restrict the possibilities of enough exploration, but according to Søren (annex 2) you need to have concrete sales goals from the beginning to secure project survival when you are operating in a SME with a main focus within sales, or else the project will simply die of early.
For Maria this meant, that she had to focus on optimizing and turning her newly founded partnerships into profitable channels already from the beginning, as well as keep exploring as she still needed more activities to build a strong enough base to support her sales target and growth expectations. When asked if she believes that Campus could have kept growing by only focusing on the initial explorative ideas she replied: “No way! I could have optimized our lecture concept for years, but we would never have reached our desired volume without some alternative events” (annex 1, p.4). This is the essence of why ambidexterity is such an important concept to understand and work with, for Maria couldn’t have created the initial success she did if she didn’t cycle forth and back between the two logics. In a macro-perspective, considering all four years, this first year were primarily characterized by being explorative.
Traditionally, exploration is related to long-term goals of search for new markets and profits, and exploitation is related to short-term goals of here-and-now profits by doing more of what you are already good at. For many companies, however, they
more than one year ahead, especially not if you are an operative manager and therefore are held accountable for sales growth on a short term basis. Short and long term then becomes somewhat closer to each other. Going back to one of my first points about ambidexterity being a nested concept, the ambidexterity dilemma will have to be resolved at the operative and individual level ultimately as it spans the entire hierarchy. So how do you go about that, what comes first for example, exploration, exploitation or a simultaneously pursuit? What can be observed in the Campus division is quite interesting.
The way profits are achieved in the department is strongly related to finding new ways to get student signups (exploration), as the sales goals are fairly stretched, meaning that pure exploitation wouldn't be enough to get all sales, not when Maria started in 2011 and not now in 2014. Even more interesting, it seems that exploitation is considered the long-term factor securing the in-house capabilities to actually handle the big growth returns on all the explorative activities. So in this sense it is almost as if the traditional logic is reversed with exploration securing profits both short and long-term and exploitation act as the lubricant which ensures that the division is geared towards handling all these new projects effectively.
Implications for ambidexterity
It seems so far that two factors positively help secure a foundation for ambidextrous competency to emerge from. The first factor is to build strong dual pressures in the project/division/team from the beginning, no matter how big your budget is. When you are forced to deliver value fairly quick you first of all become good at managing product pipelines with many different small projects, as you don’t have time to only see one through at a time, only to see it possibly fail. Furthermore you are forced to think practically from the beginning as ideas will only take you so far in securing actual profits short-term. Engaging in this behavior is something that is likely to improve your competencies within areas such as creative problem solving, overall adaptability and speed to market – all useful competencies in building ambidextrous competency.
Brown & Eisenhardt (1997) call this “to probe”, meaning that successful companies who seek to do multiple-product innovation, should have lots of small inexpensive projects to probe into the future, which is what the division does when it creates lot of fairly inexpensive concepts. The division then test the concept at one school, if successful - a full semester, and if still successful are transferred to be considered a permanent activity that is now communicated and optimized (exploitation) so it can be rolled out on all partner-schools the coming semester.
The second factor relates to motivation and the level of the hierarchy. By seeking to achieve ambidextrous competences at the operational level, because you actually need those competences to survive as a project, you will also be the recipient of your own solutions. This means that whatever you create (explore) you will also be the one who will have to execute that project and improve it. This is something that is only possible by having a more or less contextual ambidexterity setting or relatively fast-phased temporal cycling, as a structural separation often would mean that e.g. the R&D department would figure out something new, and then another department or customer base would have to live with those solutions – something that can be very costly and time consuming, should the product or tool not live up to its promised potential. However, when you yourself create and test your solutions, and even in the case of the Campus division, are in contact with a broad majority of your customer base on a weekly basis, it becomes fast and more fluent to improve new service offers and events. This is also what Birkinshaw & Gibson (2004) talks about when they say, that structural separation can lead to isolation as R&D and business development groups lack the linkage to core business.
According to the communication manager Søren Hanager (annex 2) he also believes that the best results are achieved if the same person is responsible for both exploration and exploitation, and he continues saying that he believes that it is healthy for all individuals to have both logics as you have to be careful about giving the
“creatives” the exclusive right to be creative. I will touch further on the more personal