HP’s founders understood the value of innovation. The company succeeded, in part, by empowering small teams of developers to create innovative solutions. A team of 10 people collaborating with Canon created the revolutionary LaserJet printer. Six engineers designed HP’s successful blade server. During those years, HP looked a lot more like Apple and Google.

The split will create two different companies within a large organisation that is lead by the same CEO, HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which will require incremental and discontinuous innovation, respectively. Von Stamm (2008) points out that there has been much debate as to whether large organisations can pursue both incremental and radical innovation successfully. Particularly, O’Reilly and Tushman (1997; 2004) argue that the same organisation cannot successfully pursue various types of innovation, and companies would be well advised to divide their organisations into two to pursue each type innovation separately. In their Ambidextrous Organisation model, the role of top management is to bring together both components of the organisation into a common vision of the firm and put in place the management process that balances both agendas. According to Boer and Gertsen (2003) this means HP must simultaneously become both ‘singular organic’ and ‘singular mechanistic’. However, Von Stamm (2008) would argue that HP have become a pure ‘reactor’, that is, neither exploring nor exploiting innovation at all, and thus not keeping up with their past-paced external environment. Thus, in Boer and Gertsen’s (2003) model, HP must be at least ‘binary’, and ideally ‘dual’, in order to simultaneously pursue stability and change and to be known as an ‘ambidextrous organisation’ (O’Reilly and Tushman, 2004).

HP’s traditional products and processes do not lend themselves to the new demands of the technology market and