Costas Andriopoulos
Established firms are organised to defend what they already do well. The same discipline that protects today’s margin makes the search for the next business feel slow, indulgent, and easy to defund. Leaders need a way to run both at once, without the exploration agenda quietly losing every internal argument.
Costas Andriopoulos is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Bayes Business School and the author of “Purposeful Curiosity,” whose work helps leaders run today’s business and build the next one inside the same organisation.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Costas Andriopoulos
- He has built one of the most cited academic foundations for organisational ambidexterity, the discipline of running exploitation and exploration in parallel, and translates it into language a leadership team can act on rather than admire.
- His 2009 Organization Science paper with Marianne Lewis is on most senior reading lists in the field, which gives the boardroom conversation a defensible reference point when innovation budgets come under pressure.
- “Purposeful Curiosity” gives leaders a working method for the awkward middle of an innovation cycle, where the question is not whether to explore but how to keep the inquiry productive when results are slow.
- As founder of Bayes X, he runs a live research programme on disruption with corporate partners, so the case material he brings to a session is current rather than historical.
- He has acted as thematic advisor on the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF, giving him a working view of how capital markets currently price the very disruption that operating leaders are trying to manage.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Bayes Business School, City, University of London
- Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, Bayes Business School
- Founder and Director, Bayes X, the school’s Research Centre for Innovation and Disruption
- Director, Avyssos Advisors Ltd., innovation management consultancy
- Author, “Purposeful Curiosity” (Yellow Kite/Hachette, 2022), endorsed by Adam Grant
- Co-author, “Managing Change, Creativity and Innovation” (5th edition, Sage, 2024)
- Research published in Organization Science, Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, and California Management Review
- Thematic advisor to the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF
Biography
The hardest problem inside an established firm is not whether to innovate. It is how to keep the innovation agenda alive against the gravitational pull of the existing business. Costas Andriopoulos has spent two decades building the academic and practical answer to that question.
His 2009 paper with Marianne Lewis in Organization Science set out how ambidextrous firms hold exploitation and exploration in productive tension rather than collapsing one into the other. The work has become a reference point for how senior teams discuss the paradox of running today’s business while building tomorrow’s. He has continued that line of research through articles in Human Relations, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning and California Management Review.
At Bayes Business School he holds the chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, serves as Associate Dean for MBA Programmes, and founded the Bayes X Centre for Innovation and Disruption. Through Avyssos Advisors he works with founders and corporate leadership teams; through the Amundi (Lyxor) MSCI Disruptive Technology ETF advisory work he sees the same disruption priced by capital markets.
“Purposeful Curiosity,” published by Yellow Kite in 2022 and endorsed by Adam Grant, took that research base to a wider audience. Its argument is operational rather than inspirational: curiosity becomes useful only when it is structured, directed, and protected against the day-to-day demands that crowd it out. That is the brief he brings into a leadership room.
Key speaking topics
- Organisational ambidexterity
- Disruptive innovation in established firms
- Purposeful curiosity as a leadership discipline
- Innovation portfolio management
- Entrepreneurial mindset inside corporates
- Leading creative teams
- The paradox of exploitation and exploration
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive committees holding both a profitability and a growth mandate
- Chief Innovation Officers and heads of R&D under board pressure to show returns from exploration
- CHROs and learning leaders building leadership development programmes that include innovation capability
- Founders and senior leadership teams of scale-ups moving from a single product to a portfolio
Audience outcomes
- A clear vocabulary for the paradox of running today’s business while building the next one
- A defensible reference framework, drawn from peer-reviewed research, for protecting the exploration agenda inside an established firm
- A working method for converting individual curiosity into a managed organisational practice
- Examples of how ambidextrous firms structure decisions, incentives and team design to hold both modes at once
Talks
A working session on how senior leaders can structure curiosity as a managed discipline rather than a personality trait.
Key takeaways:
- Why most organisational curiosity dies inside the existing business model
- How leaders protect inquiry from the operating cadence that crowds it out
- What a curiosity practice looks like at team and portfolio level
A keynote on the leadership behaviours that keep innovation alive once a firm is established.
Key takeaways:
- The questions senior leaders avoid asking, and why
- How curiosity changes the quality of strategic conversations
- The link between leader behaviour and team willingness to explore
A session for innovation and R&D leaders on the question architecture behind breakthrough work.
Key takeaways:
- Distinguishing productive inquiry from idle curiosity
- The role of constraints in directing exploration
- How to interrogate assumptions inside a mature business model