How Ambidextrous Is Your Company's Culture?

Companies need to be more innovative in meeting the increasing demands of today s global competitive pressures and rapid market changes. In recent years, the need for innovation has made ambidexterity the ability to achieve incremental and radical innovation simultaneously an appealing concept to literature. Further, literature has found organizational culture to be a key for managing innovation. However, while it is evident that culture and ambidexterity have great relevance for innovation, the number of articles written on the intersection between these remain scarce. In this master s thesis, we examine the concept of ambidexterity in relation to a comprehensive framework for innovative cultures comprised of the six building blocks: resources, processes, success, values, behaviors, and climate in order to enhance the understanding of how these two concepts are related. To our knowledge, a conceptualization of an entire company culture has not previously been investigated with a particular focus on ambidexterity. The broad scope of the innovative culture framework used means that this paper includes a comprehensive literature review, which can be valuable for anyone interested in company cultures for innovation. Drawing on survey data from SISVI a Norwegian project set in the cross-section between business and research we propose that ambidexterity and a company s culture for innovation are positively correlated. Findings indicate that all aspects of the cultural framework are indeed positively correlated to ambidexterity, suggesting that a company can improve its level of ambidexterity by improving the company s culture for innovation