How Do Ambidextrous Teams Create New Products? Cognitive Ambidexterity, Analogies, and New Product Creation

Abstract

For long-term survival, companies must master both exploitative and explorative knowledge processes in new product creation (NPC). Cognitive ambidexterity refers to the NPC team's ability to successfully combine exploration and exploitation. However, insights on how cognitive ambidexterity is achieved in NPC processes are scarce. This study adopts one promising approach, the use of analogies and analogical thinking, as knowledge processes that help to achieve cognitive ambidexterity in NPC. The first empirical results in this paper confirm that the utilization of near, medium-far, and far analogies in NPC processes facilitates the development of both radically and incrementally new products. The results show that creation of favorable conditions for analogies to born, team composition and configuration matter when pursuing utilization of analogies for cognitive ambidexterity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.