Turning Lemons Into Lemonade: Building for Attentional Dynamism and Resourcefulness in Routines

The adage, “Turning Lemons into Lemonade,” is often used to describe resourcefulness in taking constraints of a situation or resource and turning it into something meaningful or of value. Organizations in competitive environments are faced with the challenges in transforming these “lemons” or resources in their operational routines toward greater organizational performance. Greater performance, as argued in this paper, may include increased organizational reliability (e.g., error reduction) to build on exploitative potential and innovation to build on explorative potential. One literature that may be used to explain the transformational process to reach these ends is the dynamic capabilities literature. While this literature investigates some of the process dynamics by moving beyond the resource based view, it fails to account for sub-factors that contribute to attentional dynamism necessary for this transformational process to occur. Attentional dynamism, as argued in this paper, is a form of flexible co...