
It is rational to protect your core business. It has revenues, profits, and there is a security in knowing how to satisfy your customer’s needs. Unfortunately, that can mean sacrificing your long-term growth to protect current resources and capabilities in the short-term. Firms thrive when they embrace the tension between optimizing their core business and exploring and scaling new opportunities. We call this Ambidexterity – the ability to simultaneously manage Core and Explore businesses.
The Ambidextrous Organization is a proven approach to managing these tensions. Firms that execute it successfully are able to generate organic growth that outperforms growth through acquisition. They do this by giving new ventures autonomy, usually in a separate unit or entity, and while retaining access to the assets of the core business, which they can use to scale faster than a startup.
Change Logic has decades of experience applying this approach and by researching its application in hundreds of organizations worldwide. No firm on the planet has our depth of knowledge and experience in building Ambidextrous Organizations.
We work with our clients in five key areas:
- Assess an organization’s readiness to become ambidextrous and identify opportunities to build innovation capabilities.
- Innovation Team to set up the core team that will design and execute a firm’s Ambidextrous Organization.
- Organization Design to develop and implement ambidextrous structures and mechanisms for managing interdependency with core business units.
- Ambidextrous Portfolio Management to make decisions about how to allocate resources across an explore portfolio, managing progress towards innovation goals by defining metrics that hold innovation units accountable, without limited them to short-term results.
- Execution Plan and Analysis to determine the next steps and action items to pursue and define the barriers and enablers to executing this
“Every company has a core product that they produce today, and if they are a smart company, they have to activate their R&D departments to come up with new products for future generations so that they connect with the customers of tomorrow”
Tomer Zvulun
Artistic Director of The Atlanta Opera