Organizational tensions in dedicated innovation projects: a fuzzy set configurational approach

International audienceThe rationale behind dedicated exploration projects is that large companies need specific organizational tools if they want to achieve more than incremental innovations. However, as they try to generate new knowledge, those projects often need specific organizational routines and knowledge search distant from the company’s core, leading to integration challenges. The theory of paradoxes suggests that those tensions between integrative and generative mechanisms take place in four areas: organizing, belonging, learning and performing. However empirical research on how actors successfully deal with those tensions is still scarce. Moreover, little is known about how tensions can also be solved across these four areas in an interdependent manner. To feel this gap, we collected data from 39 actors participating to twelve internal dedicated projects in two industry-leading multinational corporations. We capture tensions throughout their discourses, based on in-depth interviews. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative approach, we identify which configurations of integrative and generative mechanisms relate to perceived exploration performance. Results show that, taken separately, each one of the four areas show favorable tensions that are different from those resulting from the study of all the dimensions taken simultaneously. According to these findings, local favorable tensions (at parent organization level for instance) may disappear when we introduce other dimensions (learning tensions for instance). In line with the theory of paradox, our research advocates to use a global and systemic approach of the paradoxical tensions of innovation