Developing Intellectual Capital within Agile IT Teams: a literature Review

Since the Agile Manifesto was presented in 2001, more and more organizations move from traditional, plan-driven software development to agile approaches. This movement is motivated by the fact that environments are changing quickly and new requirements need fast implementation. We conducted a structured literature review to identify the current state of knowledge about agile IT teams and how they develop ambidextrous organizational learning to respond to rapid changes. We draw on the intellectual capital theory with the aim to explore key capabilities of agile IT teams of prior research. Afterwards, we synthesize the key capabilities considering intellectual capital. We derive intellectual capital configurations that enable IT teams to develop ambidextrous organizational learning. Furthermore, we identified technological oriented capabilities of infrastructure flexibility and architecture modularity for agile IT teams. Therefore, we built the concept of technological capi-tal and arranged these capabilities. Thus, this study contributes to research by highlighting the char-acteristics that enable IT teams to be agile and thus helping companies to gain competitive advantage. Furthermore, we discuss possibilities how balance in ambidextrous organizational learning could be achieved. Additionally, we provide further research opportunities in this research stream.