In business, public administration and other spheres of social life it is necessary to follow adaptability to a certain extent. But innovativeness is a much desired option for development too. How to avoid contradicting both of them?
The question you are after Arvydas Guogis is, at what point do you diverge from the norm, break with tradition or break the operating paradigm and at what point do you converge with it or towards it.
Ordinarily, there should not be a contradiction. The latter is what organisations and businesses do everyday. They benchmark themselves and if they are behind the curve on quality, efficiency etc., they then undertake "efficiency driven" innovations to close the gap.
To stay competitive however, organisations and businesses have to create new markets and categories. To this end, they undertake "innovative initiatives" to open up the gap between themselves and their peer group of organisations and companies.
See an HBR piece by Tushman and O'Reilly on how organisations generally manage the two (2).
https://hbr.org/2004/04/the-ambidextrous-organization
You might be interested in having a look at these papers:
Presentation New forms of work: agility, flexibility, precariousness
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One way to look at this problem is in terms of the external environment the organization is facing... The response to changes that are fairly continuous and predictable are much easier to deal with then the responses to conditions that are discontinuous or "agile" (Volatile, Uncertain, etc). The normal administrative capacity of an organization is sub-optimal when it comes to coming up with the creative responses required to deal with these kinds of problems... I would suggest the use of complexity theory to provide the basis of analysis. There is an exceptional discussion of this approach in Marion and Gonzales, 2014 (Leadership in Education: Organizational theory for the practitioner)... Don't let the education title get in your way... It is probably the single most readable text on Organizational theory/behavior on the market...
In a large, german company, I have observed competence teams that are e.g. responsible for innovativeness in intern digital developments. They have been given time and space from the management board.
I do not see contradiction between adaptability and innovations.The dilemma is a consequence of the way things are viewed by classical science and is based on Aristotle's logic: a phenomenon belongs either to category X, or to not X. It cannot be both, neither, in between, or “it depends”(Gesherson, C.) So I recommend complexity theory which allows for insight the basic duality between parts which are at the same time distinct and connected.The root of the word complexus means intertwined or embraced
Dear Arvydas,
Innovativeness is the most productive way of adaptability. I first proved this in 1993-1997 in a longitudinal study of Russian industrial enterprises which passed the deep post-Soviet transformational economic and social crisis. the greatest importance to achieve the proper adaptability is to allow and to promote innovativeness at all organizational levels.
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