SCHINDLER Josef, DBA

Josef Schindler started his career in 2007 at Siemens, a leading international technology firm, where he focused on strategy & innovation consulting, and operations. He is an expert in digital businesses and tech innovations and has been Founder and Managing Director of multiple high-tech startups. He also possesses extensive experience and certification as a business coach catering to executives, managers, and entrepreneurs. Moreover, he is a renowned speaker on topics like disruptive innovations, startup culture, digitization, and scaling-up.

In September 2023, he is set to defend his Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) with a thesis titled “Internal Startups: A Strategic Framework for Disruptive Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Organizational Ambidexterity.” His research adopts a systems theoretical approach to address the strategic balance between sustaining and disruptive innovation within established companies. His academic journey is guided by the supervision of Professor Dr. Andreas Kallmünzer, Excelia Business School – France.

Pr Andreas Kallmuenzer

Internal startups – A strategic framework to disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship and organizational ambidexterity

This thesis aims to improve the understanding of strategies on how established companies can respond to disruptive innovation, handle increasing complexity, facilitate entrepreneurial culture and processes, and successfully manage organizational ambidexterity to balance both sustaining and disruptive innovation under one organizational roof. A systematic review of more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last decade provides an integrative picture of the state of the art of the research on disruptive innovation response strategies in established firms.
It was observed that firm performance increases with ambidexterity, while its inherent complexity mitigates the effect and can even reduce overall performance. The practical matter of how to efficiently manage this complexity appears to be a decisive factor that has to date been
insufficiently investigated. Therefore a qualitative multiple case study was conducted to explore successful practices of innovation ambidexterity (IA) and in particular their organizational design, entrepreneurial culture & mindset, processes and leadership. In 15 in-depth interviews,
two internationally established firms that have launched and established IA programs provided deep insights revealing their strategy and learnings on the path towards effective innovation ambidexterity.
The findings show that accepting and managing the inherent complexity increases within an ambidextrous organization strategy is a decisive factor in achieving effective IA. As a result, segmentation into small organizational units and granting them extensive autonomy is proposed
for managing the complexity of an organization while increasing its effectiveness. Furthermore, it is shown that this helps foster entrepreneurial culture, mindsets, and processes as additional mediators for achieving effective IA. Coaching, empowerment and trust were identified as key factors of ambidextrous leadership values that encourage entrepreneurial behavior and decision-making.
This is to the best of the author’s knowledge the first study connecting the research fields complexity management, organizational ambidexterity theory, and entrepreneurial culture while applying some of the fundamentals of systems theory to propose a practical management framework for successfully responding to disruptive innovation.