Organizational ambidexterity : a practice approach in haute patisserie

Organisations and organisational actors in creative industries conceive, produce and distribute creative products (Jones et al., 2016), which confronts them with a tension between explorative and exploitative imperatives (e.g. Knight & Harvey, 2015; Lampel et al., 2000; March, 1991; Patrick, 2018; Tschang, 2007; Wu & Wu, 2016). They need to cultivate creativity and always include a certain degree of novelty in their productions while at the same time leveraging existing offerings (e.g., Jones et al., 2016; Lampel et al., 2000) to ensure their economic sustainability. This tension is further exacerbated in those creative industries whose production and distribution processes are semi or fully industrial and, therefore, require the reproduction of creative outputs (e.g., Slavich et al., 2014).Existing research has so far suggested that the tension between exploration and exploitation could be managed by differentiating activities dedicated to each imperative, for example by developing differentiated spaces, units, or work sequences at the organisational (Amabile et al., 1996; Svejenova et al., 2007) or individual level (Wu & Wu, 2016). Alternatively, other scholars have suggested shifting the focus from managing tensions to transcending them and seeking synergies (Andriopoulos & Lewis, 2009; Papachroni & al., 2015). Our study extends this latter line of work and aims to contribute to a better understanding of how the tensions between the imperatives of exploration and exploitation are reconciled on a daily basis, with a focus on organisational practices in a particular creative industry.