A chieving exploitation and exploration enables success, even survival, but raises challenging tensions. Ambidextrous organizations excel at exploiting existing products to enable incremental innovation and at exploring new opportunities to foster more radical innovation, yet related research is limited. Largely conceptual, anecdotal, or single case studies offer architectural or contextual approaches. Architectural ambidexterity proposes dual structures and strategies to differentiate efforts, focusing actors on one or the other form of innovation. In contrast, contextual approaches use behavioral and social means to integrate exploitation and exploration. To develop a more comprehensive model, we sought to learn from five, ambidextrous firms that lead the product design industry. Results offer an alternative framework for examining exploitationexploration tensions and their management. More specifically, we present nested paradoxes of innovation: strategic intent (profit-breakthroughs), customer orientation (tight-loose coupling), and personal drivers (discipline-passion). Building from innovation and paradox literature, we theorize how integration and differentiation tactics help manage these interwoven paradoxes and fuel virtuous cycles of ambidexterity. Further, managing paradoxes becomes a shared responsibility, not only of top management, but across organizational levels.

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Creative workers often experience identity tensions. On the one hand, ‘creatives’ desire to see themselves as distinctive in their artistry, passion, and self-expression, nurturing an identity that energizes their innovative efforts. Yet daily pressures to meet budgets, deadlines and market demands encourage a more business-like identity that supports firm performance. Through a comparative case study of New Product Design (NPD) consultancies, we explicate the potential management of such identity tensions. Case evidence illustrates overarching, paradoxical approaches to identity regulation as the firms emphasized both differentiation and integration strategies. Differentiation practices promoted disparate identities by segregating related roles in time and space, while integration efforts encouraged a more synergistic meta-identity as ‘practical artists’. Leveraging paradox literature, we discuss how these strategies may accommodate creative workers’ needs to cope with multiple identities, as well as their aversion to sanctioned subjectivities.

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In today’s competitive business environment, global competition forces companies to perpetually seek ways of improving their products/services. Organisations increasingly aspire to become more creative and capitalise on the benefits of creativity, and perceive the development of conditions that encourage creativity within their working environment as a long‐term process rather than a quick fix to their current problems. While the capability of an organisation to become more creative must start at the level of the individual, individual creativity in itself is not enough. A vital, often ignored component of creativity is the creativity that occurs at the organisational level. This paper reviews writings in an attempt to clearly identify the factors that influence organisational creativity and hence that need to be taken into consideration when managing creativity in organisational settings. The literature review summarises five key factors that affect organisational creativity, namely organisational climate, leadership style, organisational culture, resources and skills and the structure and systems of an organisation.