Action versus Reflection : Organizational Improvisation and the Emergence of Bottom-up Strategic Initiatives

Organizational improvisation has a peculiar status in the field of strategic management, even though it is an appealing subject for study, as it melds processes of cognition and action. Our paper hence strives to introduce improvisation into strategy process research as a potentially powerful tool for organizations to create competitive advantage. Improvisational actions can serve as unplanned experiments which can then arouse autonomous strategic initiatives as a major source of variation out of which organizations can select new products and markets. Our paper develops a simple model of how organizational improvisation can lead to strategic initiatives and how this relationship is moderated by organizational memory and horizontal knowledge flows. A set of testable hypotheses is provided and the research project is de-scribed afterwards.