Digital transformation in traditional companies: Combining ambidexterity and dynamic capability perspectives

Organizations that do not embrace digital transformation may find themselves falling behind on competitors and losing out on potential innovation and growth opportunities. As the business environment is changing at an unprecedented pace, it is becoming increasingly important to balance continuity and change to achieve long-term success. By...

Designing Organisational Revolution: Exploring the role of design in the quest for progressive organisations

Organisations find it more and more difficult to deal with our changing times, as our world has drastically changed over the last decades. This has led us to believe that organisational theory and practice from the last decades just does not hold up anymore. They have created organisations that made sense then, but do not necessarily now....

Foresight in corporates: A framework that combines design thinking and foresight activities to support corporates in fast-paced innovation times

This master thesis is written for the master program Strategic Product Design with the Belgian company Barco NV as a client. At the beginning, the main objective was to gain a better understanding on the current situation of the organization around foresight activities, their barriers and challenges. The aim was to later develop a solution that...

Unlocking lean innovation at large: Analyzing the success factors of internal lean ventures within large enterprises

Today’s market environment is characterized by increasing competition. This competition forces incumbents to innovate if they want to sustain their competitive advantage. Large enterprises start to adopt methodologies pioneered within the startup world, like the lean startup methodology, the innovate. The adoption of this methodology has proven...

Exploration of ambidexterity among SMEs in the Dutch Maritime sector: How SMEs align exploitation of existing products and pursue exploration of product innovations

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) tend to focus upon short-term profit in a crisis period, however the EU advised SMEs’ to invest in innovation and quality of products. How SMEs balance between these two contradicting strategies is seldom addressed. Therefore, this study explores how SMEs align their organization upon short term...

Unlocking Innovation: Building a Design-Led Ambidextrous Organization

By 2027 75% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone. Randomly pursuing different ideas and hoping that at least one of them can turn into something innovative is not enough anymore. We need to design organizations that can continuously create human-centered innovation. The construct of design-led ambidexterity (DLA) can support us in doing...

In pursuit of ambidexterity: The case of KLM

The aviation industry is a fast moving and extremely competitive environment, where companies need to continuously invest in order to be at the forefront of innovation in the eyes of the customers, hence always delivering an excellent service. <br/>This graduation project was carried out at KLM, the Royal Dutch Airlines, in the department of the...

Achieving Sustained Competitive Advantage for Project-Based Organizations: Case Study on How Best to Prepare for the Future

Many renowned organizations have come and go in past decades because markets in which they once thrived changed. Many factors can play a role why established organizations are slow to understand and react on external changes that create paradigm shifts. This is a universal dilemma; however established project-based organizations struggle in...