Abstract:
Organisations are marked by various paradoxes such as the need to combine old, existing and often internal knowledge with new, emerging and often external knowledge (Dougherty, 2006a; Lewis, 2000), exploration versus exploitation (Knight & Harvey, 2015), or the protection versus protection of knowledge (Bogers, 2011). In this research, we aim to understand how organisational paradoxes are elicited during strategy or innovation planning workshops. Using real-time observations and semi-structured interviews, we reveal the differences between participants‘ thought worlds that contribute toward paradoxical tensions and how those tensions are elicited during innovation planning projects.