Many innovations can emerge from a new way of naming and using what we already have within the company.
Many companies expect innovation to come from outside. New technologies, markets, talent, consultants or miracles. Much as football clubs do when they want to reverse a run of poor results by buying players from other leagues.
Often, however, the company already has resources, skills, data, processes or technical capabilities that could generate new value, but cannot see their potential, because it can see them only in the form in which it has seen them until now. In this case, the value is probably semantically hidden. Which is to say that it is trapped and hidden from view because it is described by old names and old words.
A function such as “customer service” is treated as a cost centre. A function called “maintenance” is seen as an internal service, necessary but probably of little strategic importance. The “quality” department is measured only by the number of defects it detects. A material developed for a specific use remains largely confined to its original application. In some cases, however, someone asks what this function can see that the rest of the company cannot. Or they might ask how it can contribute to the purpose and meaning towards which the business is directed. Or again: for what other problems might it be relevant, or what other value might it generate if we moved it, classified it differently or revolutionised it? Depending on the answer, the same resource can take on an entirely different significance. Customer service can become customer intelligence and acquire strategic importance for the business. Maintenance can become in-depth knowledge of the product life cycle and acquire strategic importance for innovation. Quality can become a system for learning about recurring defects. A technical anomaly can become a new product category. And there is no limit to the possibilities for discovering value in what surrounds us.
In these cases, the name generates a different way of seeing the function, because it places it within the cognitive space to which that name belongs. But the reverse also happens. The question leads us to shift the cognitive space, and then we realise that the name is no longer adequate. In business, there are many situations in which cause and effect work together to generate something new, exchanging roles.
What is certain is that a potential without a name remains invisible to the CFO, does not enter budgets, does not feature in board discussions and becomes nobody’s responsibility. And the same happens if its name is obsolete.
The unseen value of existing resources
Organisations grow accustomed to seeing their resources through the function for which they were created. If a department was set up to respond to complaints, it is measured by response times. If a technology was developed to solve a production problem, it is assessed within those boundaries. If a skill emerged in a technical context, it remains confined to technical language.
My father advised me not to study chemistry, otherwise everyone would see me as a chemist. He took chemistry as his example because it apparently seemed to him to offer little versatility. Although, to tell the truth, internationally important figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Kurt Vonnegut and even Dolph Lundgren, the famous Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, started out as chemists. Then someone, and chance, saw other abilities in them that opened up the possibility of being something else, and things turned out as they did.
The problem of using people, departments and resources in only one way, the obvious one, is particularly relevant in mature businesses and SMEs. In many companies, capabilities have accumulated over time that nobody has ever turned into strategic resources. There is knowledge, solutions born of necessity, adaptations, customer relationships, informal data, internal procedures or production techniques that appear neither in strategic documents nor even in the mind of the manager or CEO.
These are real resources, but they often lack an adequate category. And what lacks an adequate category is ignored. Management tends to see more clearly what it can name. A resource called a “cost” is cut, controlled or squeezed, and perhaps the brightest mind in the entire organisation is not even put in charge of it. A resource called an “asset” is protected, developed and put to profitable use.
A function called “support” is likely to remain peripheral: it does not have a frontman’s name. A function called “intelligence” is more readily listened to, even if they do almost the same thing.
How much craft expertise has been wasted because it was not described as proprietary process knowledge!
We all agree that changing the name is not enough, but we agree even more, I imagine, that not changing it is even less enough.
Feathers before flight
Evolutionary biology offers a useful concept for understanding this mechanism: exaptation. Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba introduced the term to describe traits that did not originally develop for the function they perform today. The most frequently cited case is that of feathers. They are thought to have evolved for functions such as thermoregulation, and later to have become the structural prerequisite for flight. Structure preceded function. A trait that arose for one reason proved decisive for another. Perhaps an even more important one.
The same logic deserves to be applied to organisations. A capability can emerge to solve a narrowly defined problem and become, years later, the basis of a different competitive advantage. An internal technology can become a product. A procedure can become a method. A skill developed out of necessity can become an offering.
The examples of exaptation are potentially endless.
What I mean is that we need to rethink what we have available and try to enhance it, to apply new categories, to answer the questions we ask ourselves when we want to develop creative thinking. This can help us recognise a new function in something that already existed.
This shift can be called, more precisely, semantic exaptation: the moment when a new classification makes visible an economic function already potentially present in an organisation’s resource.
The word “semantic” is crucial. It is not just a matter of recombining resources, but of making it possible to think about them differently, because a resource is also the way it is described. The description shapes metrics, budgets, expectations and decisions.
We have seen it: customer service or intelligence? Clearly, everything is different. The former makes us think of a waiter in a bow tie, as in some of those slightly dated website icons still to be seen around, while the latter, intelligence, makes us think of elegant spies speeding along the Côte d’Azur in an Aston Martin.
This concept connects with three highly authoritative management traditions. Henry Mintzberg showed that strategy does not always originate as a deliberate plan, but can emerge from action and be recognised retrospectively.
Saras Sarasvathy, through the theory of effectuation, explained that experienced entrepreneurs often start not with a predefined goal, but with the means available: who they are, what they know, whom they know and what possibilities they can build from what they have.
Karl Weick, through sensemaking, clarified that organisations do not merely react to a given environment: they construct meaning, select cues, stabilise interpretations and act within the categories they make available.
Semantic exaptation sits at this point: between emergent strategy, available resources and organisational language.
Three cases in which the value was already there
The Post-it story is one of the clearest examples. Spencer Silver, a researcher at 3M, developed a weak, reusable adhesive that initially seemed to solve no obvious problem. It was a solution without a category, a product without a name.
Only when Art Fry applied it to the practical problem of bookmarks falling out of his hymn book did the adhesive change meaning: from ineffective glue to repositionable adhesive. The turning point was semantic: a weakness was reclassified as a useful property.
A second case is Amazon Web Services. Amazon had developed enormous infrastructural expertise to support its own growth: computing capacity, storage, reliability and the management of large volumes. The strategic turning point came when that expertise was no longer interpreted solely as internal infrastructure, but as a platform that could be sold to others. Amazon S3, launched in 2006, promised developers access to scalable, reliable, low-cost storage infrastructure, the same infrastructural logic needed to support Amazon’s operations.
The value already existed as an internal capability. The new classification made it visible by turning it into a business.
A third case, less well known but particularly apt, concerns PVDC, polyvinylidene chloride latex, later known under the Saran brand. The liquid latex was used by the military to protect aircraft on aircraft carriers from salt and moisture. Subsequently, after modifications to eliminate its unpleasant colour and odour, the same barrier property was reinterpreted for food packaging. It was no longer just a matter of keeping moisture or air out, but also of keeping aromas in and preserving freshness. Dow launched Saran Wrap as a consumer product in the 1950s, with great commercial success that continues to this day; it is quite possible that more than one packet of biscuits in your cupboard reaches you so fragrant and crisp thanks to the use of PVDC to turn paper and aluminium into a particularly impermeable barrier between the outside world and the biscuits.
In all three cases, the value was not immediately apparent because the resource was imprisoned within an inadequate definition. A weak adhesive, an internal infrastructure and a military anti-corrosion material. The turning point comes when the management question changes: in what other context can this property become value?
Why companies fail to see what they have
If this mechanism is so powerful, why do many companies not use it? At least four reasons seem clear.
The first is that functions are named according to the organisational chart, not according to the value they can generate. “Administration”, “support”, “IT”, “quality”, “maintenance” and “logistics” are often descriptive names, but strategically impoverished ones. They tell us where a function sits, not what it can see or what resources it has available.
The second is that metrics measure current performance, not alternative potential. A customer service department measured only by response times will tend to optimise response times. But if it is also measured by its ability to identify recurring patterns, emerging needs and systemic causes of complaints, it will change the way it acts, which cannot change, however, until the indicator by which it is assessed has changed.
The third is that efficiency, when it becomes the sole criterion, eliminates what does not yet have an obvious use. The problem arises when efficiency becomes the only permitted form of managerial intelligence. In that case, the organisation cuts redundancies, peripheral skills, anomalies and marginal resources that seem useless today but could become strategic options tomorrow.
The fourth reason is linguistic. Internal vocabulary stabilises cognitive habits. When something has been called a “cost” for years, it becomes difficult to see it as an “asset”. When a department is called “support”, it becomes difficult to treat it as a source of knowledge, and so on. And this despite the fact that words define the realm of what is thinkable in strategy.
Five questions for discovering hidden value
To turn what has been said into management practice, there is no need to begin with major innovation programmes. What is needed is to begin with a simple thinking exercise, and ask:
1. Which business function are we treating solely as a cost?
Every company has functions seen almost exclusively as necessary expenses. Customer service, maintenance, logistics, quality control, administration and the technical department. Well, what can they see thanks to their position?
Customer service sees recurring problems before marketing does. Maintenance knows how products actually behave better than many designers do. Quality control detects systemic defects before they become crises. Logistics sees operational friction that often reflects deeper problems with the offering.
2. Which internal skill solves a problem of ours that might also be a problem for others?
Many businesses develop sophisticated capabilities to meet internal needs. A system for managing production complexity. A method for reducing errors. Internal software. A control procedure. A form of traceability. A capacity for customisation.
As long as that expertise is seen only as a response to an internal problem, it remains confined. But if other businesses share the problem, that capability can become a service, a product, a licence, consultancy or AWS.
3. Which technical flaw could become a useful feature in another context?
Not all anomalies are errors to be eliminated. Some are properties without a market. Let us ask whether what appears weak in one context might become useful in another. The Post-it adhesive was not strong enough for the original objective. For precisely that reason, it was perfect for a different use. Weakness became repositionability.
4. Which property can be read in reverse?
The PVDC case is useful because it shows a simple conceptual transformation: a barrier can prevent entry, but it can also prevent escape. The same property, in this case a physical property, is read in the opposite direction.
Many organisational resources work like this. Expertise developed to protect can serve to certify. A procedure developed to control can become an assurance for the customer. A technology developed to reduce internal risks can become a source of commercial trust.
5. What new name would change metrics, budgets and responsibilities?
If I rename a function, but its metrics, budget and decisions do not change, I have not practised strategy. I have practised internal communication, with the likely result that everyone would continue to call the function by its previous name.
Reclassification is real only when it produces operational consequences. If “customer service” becomes “customer intelligence”, then what is measured must change. And perhaps the manager too. Not just tickets closed, but insights generated. Not just complaints handled, but patterns identified. Not just immediate satisfaction, but learning transferred to product, sales and marketing. The new classification must always become part of the processes by which the business is governed.
From name to decision
Management language is effective when it changes decisions. A new word matters if it shifts resources, responsibilities and attention. Otherwise, it remains a slogan.
To understand whether a reclassification has genuinely produced innovation, we can look for four signs. The first concerns metrics: the resource is assessed using different indicators from before. The second is financial: the resource can receive a budget not only to function better, but to develop new potential. The third is organisational: the resource enters meetings it did not previously attend. The fourth is strategic: the resource contributes to decisions about products, markets, positioning, pricing or the business model.
Only at that point does a change of name become a change in managerial reality.
This distinguishes semantic exaptation from simple rebranding. Rebranding changes the surface. Semantic exaptation changes the economic availability of a resource. It makes it visible, measurable, open to discussion, fundable and usable in a new way.
Innovation begins when something ceases to have the wrong name
Many organisations are less short of opportunities than they believe. These are opportunities in search of categories within which they can be recognised.
Looking outside for growth, innovation and change remains necessary. There is nothing wrong with buying Brazilian players and entrusting them with the task of winning the league and the European Cup. But mature management should also ask what is already present but has not yet been named, and thus put to valuable use, in the right way.
The real voyage of discovery, Proust wrote, consists not in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes.
This article is the practical follow-up to the article Semantic Exaptation by the same author, published at this address https://www.pensieridensi.it/articoli/2025/05/exaptation_semantica/.
References
3M, “A Century of Innovation: The 3M Story”, section on the origins of Post-it Notes.
Gould, S. J. and Vrba, E. S. (1982), “Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form”, Paleobiology, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 4–15.
Mintzberg, H. and Waters, J. A. (1985), “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent”, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 257–272.
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2001), “Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 243–263.
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008), Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise,
Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing.
Weick, K. E. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications.
Amazon Web Services (2006), “Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon S3”.
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2006/3/amazon-web-services-launches
The Inventors, “Saran Wrap”.
https://theinventors.org/library/inventors/blsaranwrap.htm
Dow, historical materials on the development of Saran and PVDC.
https://www.dow.com/