One team, multiple projects: Should I make a meta-project for my team?

[James Box]

I'm trying to get my team set up on Jira (we're testing Jira, then will get the whole company set up on it if things go well). My team is in charge of investigating new technology for the company and spearheading innovation. Naturally, we have a lot of projects or leads going on at the same time. Should I set up a project for my team as a whole, and track each topic/lead as epics, or should I set up a Jira project for each of my team's projects (e.g. Jira setup, upcoming technology A (should we support/adopt?), assessment of employee workflow, etc.)?

I feel like having one large project for my whole team is not canonical to the design/purpose of projects. (IRL) Projects should be (Jira) projects themselves. If I were to use Epics as projects, there would be a disconnect between what Epics were made for and what I'm using them for.

However, I encounter some issues when I try to make (Jira) projects for each of our (IRL) projects: When we're investigating a new technology or playing with an idea, those leads sometimes don't have enough material to create a new Jira project for. Since we consider a broad variety of leads, the creation of new projects (that may only have 3 tasks inside it for a while) can very easily get out of hand.

Is there a canonical solution to this issue? I only have experience with next-gen projects, so perhaps there's a feature of classic Jira that could help. What do your teams use?