Overview of Design Dimensions for Ambidexterity in Manufacturing Innovation Management

Continuous improvement is a core process within innovation management, as innovation managers are constantly trying to improve manufacturing systems with regards to reliability, variability and productivity. Manufacturing units must be able to deal with complex and volatile environmental circumstances while acting both exploratory and exploitatively to produce incremental and radical innovations. The organizational ability to achieve this is called ambidexterity. To address the growing challenge of ever-increasing manufacturing efficiency while simultaneously introducing radical technological concepts into the manufacturing system, the need for ambidexterity has increased significantly in recent years. Therefore, this paper presents an organizational approach to enable ambidexterity in manufacturing innovation management by identifying the most important organizational dimensions for designing such innovation management and ensuring long-term competitiveness.