| Summary: | International audience Ø Theoretical objectives and practical relevance, with key referencesIn a context of intensive and repeated innovation (Wheelwright and Clark, 1992; Le Masson et al., 2010), exploratory projects are needed to identify, share and shape the potential of value creation for future developments of new original products and commercial services (Lenfle, 2014). Despite an increasing interest in innovation management, these collective activities remain hard to manage, especially due to the specific knowledge management it requires: variance-seeking learning during exploratory projects has been underlined as success factor for next business development (McGrath, 2001). Looking for variety, exploratory projects are known to face fastidious and hazardous learning process, thus the main goal of the project is to structure and model the knowledge created on a diversity of possible design paths in an expected innovation field: teams gather knowledge on the value of the unknown (De Meyer et al, 02; Gillier et al, 2015). Contributing to overcome this research gap in innovation management, our research deals precisely with the issue of representing the links of dependences between knowledge pieces coming from individuals, collectives or experiences: how to structure, consolidate and present the links between first scraps of knowledge, even if these scraps are unfocused, undefinable even antagonists, to support collaboration in exploratory projects?Ø Approach/MethodThe theory-building process we propose in the paper build on a single case study (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007), conducted within a longitudinal collaborative research (Adler et al, 2004) on innovative capability in SME with Nutriset, a French food company initially specialized in developing and manufacturing products to fight against malnutrition that now expect to develop services for the disease prevention. The case study focuses on the knowledge management of Nutriset’s exploratory project defined as autonomous R&D services platform in ...
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