Fostering Innovation through Organizational Agility
This thesis explores the organizational agility phenomenon and its relation to innovation within the context of a technology-driven media firm and asks: How can incumbent firms embrace organizational agility to drive innovation?
The development of an agile organization promises the creation of fast-moving, adaptive entity that can effectively and efficiently foster innovation. Agility is particularly relevant for established firms attempting to innovate and flourish in the constantly changing business environment, as they may experience organizational rigidity as a significant barrier for innovation.
This thesis explores the organizational agility phenomenon and its relation to innovation within the context of a technology-driven media firm and asks: How can incumbent firms embrace organizational agility to drive innovation? An exploratory case study of a technology-driven media firm.
The study identifies the main drivers of shifting the company towards organizational agility and provides an in-depth inquiry into the key hallmarks of this concept. Further, it discusses the main outcomes in the form of experienced challenges and gained benefits.
By adopting organizational agility, the company was found to achieve better flexibility, increased speed and enhanced customer focus. The firm increases its innovation capacity through gained benefits which improve the effectiveness of the innovation process.
The findings show that agility can be cultivated at an organizational level by perceiving it as an enabler for these benefits, and at the same time, seeing it as a mindset that is promoted throughout the firm.
This research finds that embracing organizational agility may facilitate sustaining innovation in a technology-driven firm. Additionally, identified hallmarks of organizational agility and gained benefits may support a technology-driven firm in executing a fast follower strategy.
An excessive customer-centricity potentially hindering disruptive innovation is articulated as an overall challenge related to adopting organizational agility. If there is a desire for more disruptive outcomes, a firm should balance exceptional sustaining innovation facilitated by adopting organizational agility with initiatives allowing for groundbreaking solutions.