Not a gap but an overlap: Project teams navigating the critical shift from exploration to exploitation in technological innovation

Purpose: Companies in the financial services sector are faced with a turbulent, destabilizing environment and challenged with the capacity to maintain existing activities while seizing new opportunities to remain competitive. Thereby, technological innovation project teams play a key role. It is hence important to understand how these teams work and how their members interact throughout the lifecycle of a technological innovation project. Against this background, we will ask the following research question: How does the transition of a technological innovation project from the exploration phase to the exploitation phase occur at the team level? Design/methodology/approach: Our research work, carried out within a large financial institution, was focused on analyzing technological innovation projects and their teams to better understand the evolution from the exploration phase to the exploitation phase during the lifecycle of such projects. To do this, we conducted a qualitative case study where we held both observer and participant roles. In addition to our observations, we conducted 11 interviews for this study, totaling nearly 10 hours of audio. We then analyzed this data using NVivo software and created a data structure according to the Gioia method. Findings: We observed that there is an overlap phase between exploration and exploitation. This is due to the fact that the two processes co-evolve in a staggered manner, with work on the product preceding work on the business model. This result implies an adaptation of models presuming a sequential transition between exploration and exploitation and leads us to the formalization of theoretical and managerial propositions. Originality: This research follows teams during the life cycle of technological innovation projects and focuses on a moment that has been relatively understudied: the transition between the exploration phase and the exploitation phase.