Abstract
Innovation and management control are both considered as determinants of business performance. Yet, these two concepts appear at first sight contradictory, and some researchers have presented them as difficult to reconcile, advocating innovative organizations to have recourse to other modes of control. The issue of the role and influence of management control in innovative context arises and motivates this doctoral work.Beyond the literature concerned with the influence of management control on innovation, we use the theoretical and conceptual frameworks bearing on managerial innovation and organizational ambidexterity in order to deal with this issue of the link between management control and product innovation. The methodology is exploratory, qualitative and adductive corresponding thus to an interpretativist epistemological positioning. It consists of a two-stage approach : an exploratory study with nineteen start-ups and SMEs innovative and two case studies of SME which are both recently entered into an innovation strategy.The results of this research show that innovation and management control are far from being antagonistic. First, management control whether interactive or cybernetic type appears as favorable to innovation, but innovation also appears to impact the management control systems, pushing companies to develop tools of control on the one hand, tools which are reshaped and adapted on the other hand. Finally, we observe that product innovation and managerial innovation support each other, but also that management control appears as contextual ambidexterity support. Moreover, this study highlights the key role of the leader as hybrid or ambidextrous actor.