Integration of an exploration program with its parent organization: A lifecycle perspective

Exploration programs are collections of interconnected exploration projects that are identified, coordinated, and managed in order to pursue a strategic objective of exploring radical innovations to be developed by the parent organization. Based on a longitudinal fine-grained study of a firm that has launched such an initiative, we offer a characterization of an exploration program and outline the coexistence of its integration with, as well as its isolation from, its parent organization. This is achieved through mechanisms and boundary activities complementing each other and undertaken by actors involved in the program and located at different levels of the parent organization. We show how this integration with the parent organization evolves between the program initiation and its implementation and how the differences lie in its exploratory nature, i.e., the definition of its scope, which is not known at its launch, the potential leveraging of the firm's existing resources to execute the exploration projects and then to further develop them, and the capitalization on the projects' outcome and the use of the knowledge that has been built in excess. Thus we further bridge the literature on project and program management with the literature on innovation management and show how an exploration program can contribute to achieving ambidexterity at the firm level.