Introducing management controls in an entrepreneurial company and its influence on achieving ambidexterity

This paper presents a study of how combinations of management controls are introduced and influencing a small entrepreneurial company over time. Particularly, it studies why these controls are introduced and how they are influencing the company´s ability to achieve ambidexterity i.e. to be flexible and innovative and yet enable the efficiency required. Using a combination of interviews and document analysis in an entrepreneurial clean-tech firm rich data on the emergence of management controls is collected. The preliminary analysis shows that drivers for introducing management controls goes from external to internal factors over time and that personnel controls slowly are replaced by more formal processes until the firm experience a fast growth in size. In this phase, the organisation is seen to intensively introduce both more formal processes and structures in parallel to a strong focus on a consciously strengthen its entrepreneurial cultural to achieve ambidexterity. The study is able to put some light on challenges related to how small entrepreneurial companies are managing an ambition to remain innovative while increasing its level of management control as a response to its growing in size. The result from the study indicates that the types of management controls in use over time builds on each other and that the introduction of management controls to manage innovation is particularly challenging.QC 20190430