Innovating and optimizing in public organizations: does more become less?

To enhance public service performance (PSP), public organizations are challenged to and innovate their processes, techniques, policies and services. But can organizations go too far when innovating and optimizing? Based on survey from Dutch water authorities, we show that optimization initially contributes to PSP than innovation, but its contribution is curvilinear: the impact of becomes smaller the more optimization is conducted. The relation innovation and PSP is, however, linear. Based on additional qualitative , we show that ambidextrous water authorities run less risk of over-optimizing use integrative strategies to deal with innovation-optimization tensions.