What is it about?
Managers often struggle to judge whether their organisation invests enough in tomorrow’s innovation while running today’s operations efficiently. This study offers a practical five-step roadmap: (1) conduct rapid employee diagnoses to surface process pain-points; (2) cost each dysfunction to expose hidden financial impact; (3) classify findings as exploitation or exploration; (4) translate issues into 10 SMART KPIs on a single dashboard; (5) track KPIs monthly and use data to rebalance budgets. A pilot in a Lebanese manufacturer revealed a USD 158k hidden-cost bias toward exploitation and triggered immediate corrective actions.
Featured Image
Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Companies that focus only on short-term efficiency often fall into a "success trap," neglecting the innovation they need to survive long term. Until now, managers have lacked a concrete, affordable way to measure this imbalance, especially smaller firms in challenging economies. This research provides a replicable five-step method that any organisation can use to expose hidden costs, give them a monetary value, and rebalance attention between efficiency and innovation. In the case studied, simply making these hidden costs visible triggered immediate corrective action and a measurable reduction in wasted resources within three months, showing that the approach delivers fast, low-cost results.
Perspectives
This study grew out of a simple question that many managers ask but few can answer with data: are we investing enough in our future, or just keeping the lights on today? By combining the Socio-Economic Approach to Management, developed over four decades at ISEOR in Lyon, with the language of organisational ambidexterity, we wanted to give practitioners, particularly those in emerging markets and resource-constrained settings, a tool they can actually use rather than another abstract framework. For me, the most encouraging finding was that transparency itself became a driver of change: once employees and managers could see the cost of hidden problems, they acted on them without needing external pressure. I hope this work is useful to managers, consultants, and fellow researchers interested in making innovation measurable.
Khaled El Haj Ismail
University of Balamand
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Organisational ambidexterity performance management via socio-economic performance metrics, Measuring Business Excellence, June 2026, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/mbe-06-2025-0136.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
