Currently, the “technology-industry-finance” cycle—propelled by models of technological and industrial leadership—faces bottlenecks in advancing the high-quality development of traditional industries. Addressing these bottlenecks is strategically important for forming a virtuous technology-industry-finance cycle and achieving high-quality economic development in China. Through an exploratory single-case study of an illustrative industrial-financial organization that has spurred high-quality upgrading in traditional sectors, this research reveals that such an organization, via strategic refocusing, can exercise cognitive, value, and architectural leadership. By employing both exploitative and exploratory ecosystem orchestration, it successively leverages industrial and technological resources, thereby initiating a virtuous cycle of “finance-led guidance-industrial restructuring-technology enablement-industrial upgrading,” while its role evolves from a general complementor to an architectural leader. This study elucidates the enabling conditions and internal mechanisms for industrial-financial organizations to transition from complementors to architects, extends the theoretical boundaries of such role transformation, and constructs a new “finance-industry-technology” framework for driving high-quality development in China’s traditional industries.