Part 6 - General conclusion and discussion

In this concluding part, we come back on the PhD journey outcomes. We synthesize our main results and contributions and we open up with discussions and future research perspectives.

The first chapter sums up the results and contributions of this PhD thesis. The model of decisional ambidexterity provided a new insight on designing decisions. Whilst supporting the innovation management through decision-design, decision-designers use exploitation to condition and steer exploration for generative processes and potential decisions. This mutual conditioning between exploration and exploitation offered new perception to reconnect new practices in innovation management such as exploration projects with organizational learning and adaptation, i.e. the original intent of ambidexterity. We also reveal how the design and decision, targeting fixation effects and interdependencies in product innovative design, are enablers of organizational change. Overall, our model allows extending ambidexterity’s validity into the unknown.

The second and final chapterropens up our discussion towards future research perspectives. We have, for management purposes, worked on the shift from decision-making to decision-designing. This novel perspective is tasked to weave new concepts (states of nature and alternatives) around interdependencies and (organizational) design fixations in order to reshape the nature of interactions. Consequently, it opens several new perspectives. The rationality and behaviour of the individual/collective stand on different assumptions and epistemologies when they are seen from the lens of cognitive psychology for decision theories and creativity theories. Organization design may as well be revisited by avoiding to focus on a target organization but rather focus on underlying dynamics of interactions, metabolisms and organizational constraints to generate alternatives, designs and prototypes. We thus propose an Organizational Design Thinking, and several ideas for new valuation and management tools for exploration project management.