In innovation and project management studies incremental development projects are perceived as theoreticlly and organisationallyuninteresting. By means of a longitudinal study of product improvement projects at an automobile firm, this paper challenges such views andshows how the cumulative impact of the studied sequence resulted in a competitive repositioning of the company's product portfolio during afinancially difficult period. Project managers achieved this by transcending the separation between exploration and exploitation projects; they notonly adhered to time, cost and quality goals but also tried out new ways of testing and experimenting with controversial technical ideas. The paperanalyzes the intensive inter project learning that generated these ambidextrous capabilities and emphasizes that practices at the project-level need tobe buttressed by expanded management learning and capability development also at the sequence level.