Innovation strategy workshops as platforms to elicit paradoxes

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.