To be competitive, it is important for companies to create a breeding ground for innovation without jeopardizing productivity. The challenge posed by industrial companies and the innovation research community is how to promote innovation while achieving efficient execution. The ability to balance execution and innovation is referred to as organizational ambidexterity (OA), which includes several dimensions, concepts and approaches where a central task can be identified. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what consequences result from different dimensions of a task in relation to the types of its actions, and their effects on OA. The focus of the task is firstly investigated, followed by the development of nine scenarios via combining the designers’ and the performers’ perspectives of the task. A brief analysis of the scenarios indicates that there is no single optimal scenario; rather, the scenarios represent different states that are appropriate for certain conditions, and dynamic adaptation should be encouraged in relation to the changing conditions. This type of dynamics is particularly expected to prevail in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) because the roles that are responsible for tasks in these organizations are less specialized. Therefore, SMEs must define tasks that include both explorative and exploitative parts, either simultaneously or sequentially, to stimulate employees to work ambidextrously and thereby develop the concept of task-based ambidexterity.

Organizational Ambidexterity (OA)–the ability to simultaneously pursue exploration and exploitation–is increasingly being advocated as a way to gain competitive advantage. Most of the work on OA has focused on large, multi-divisional organizations, resulting in frameworks and prescriptions that have little utility for small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With this in mind, we report on the first year of an exploratory, quasi-experimental study of ambidexterity within six small-to-medium manufacturing enterprises in Sweden. The research is characterized by an emic, ‘invented here’ approach, where companies closely examine their current exploration and exploitation practices, use their findings to formulate more advanced OA approaches uniquely suited to their values and circumstances, and iteratively apply and refine these over a four year period. It appears that the construct of ‘unplanned’ and associated sub-constructs such as ‘disturbance, crashes, and interruption’ could be an important key to framing and improving OA within these SMEs and perhaps more generally.