Profiles and success factors of responsive organizations

Abstract

Innovation departments in fast-changing environments face the urge of harmonizing continuous product development with the preservation and uninterrupted operation of the existing product portfolio.Resulting from the lack of responsiveness and high operational strain, traditional organization structures are not always suitable to meet these needs, creating the demand for alternative organization setups.Thus, this thesis aims to provide an overview of organizational setups that have been developed to support organizational responsiveness, and elements that allow the creation of an appropriate setup of innovative organizations. All based on the assumption that a correlation exists between meeting anorganization’s demands for operational agility and their innovative capabilities. The thesis distinguishes between the organization structure that creates the framework and enables operations, and the procedural organization that guides dynamic operational processes and responsibilities.Building on literature research, approaches to traditional and responsive organization design are identified and elaborated. By confronting these with their limitations and practical challenges, the beneficial constituents of responsive setups are carved out. Confronting these elements with the challenges derived from interviews with an innovation organization, these insights lead the discovery of organizational contributors to the organizational responsiveness, hence innovative capabilities of an organization.The work results in an extensive overview of existing responsive organization approaches supplemented with a set of empirical insights originating from case studies. Furthermore, a comparison of the practical challenges of an innovation department and the common characteristics of responsive organization setups is drawn to evaluate the practical relevance of the identified responsive characteristics.The aspect that reoccurred in different manifestations, in both responsive organization theories and casestudies, is distribution. Such ranges from procedural responsibilities to managerial authority, as well asstructural to procedural organization. It appears to be a common theme when overcoming practical challenges with responsive organization approaches as the flexibilization is achieved by independently leveraging different constituents of an organization. Hereby, the underlying organization structuresupports the operational organization by fulfilling general static functions and enabling a higher degree offlexibility by reducing the amount of static aspects within the organization.