Strategic innovation does not necessarily arise from the introduction of new resources or from research we have yet to undertake. In many cases it emerges from research we have already done: from the ability to reclassify and reposition what the organisation already possesses, transforming latent capabilities into new sources of economic value. Indeed, the most radical innovation sometimes lies in a bold reinterpretation of what is already there. It is an “inside-out” process of discovery, in which value is unlocked through a new interpretation of meaning.
The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière
The biological roots of the concept of exaptation
To understand this mechanism, we can draw on evolutionary biology. The term exaptation, coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba, provides the vocabulary needed to deconstruct the dogma of teleological adaptation. In nature, a trait has not necessarily evolved for the purpose we can observe today. Birds’ feathers are an example: originally developed for thermoregulation, millions of years later they proved to be the structural prerequisite for flight.
In business, this means that structure can precede function. A technological competence or an operational process can exist for years, serving a specific purpose, only to reveal itself as the basis of a new competitive advantage when the context, or management’s perception, changes.
Emergent strategy and effectuation
The idea that organisations can generate innovation by reinterpreting existing resources is consistent with some of the most influential contemporary theories of strategy and entrepreneurship.
For Henry Mintzberg, strategy rarely begins as a plan fully defined in advance. In most cases, it emerges from action. Organisations act, experiment and adapt, and only retrospectively recognise a coherent direction in their behaviour.
A similar dynamic is described by Saras Sarasvathy in the theory of effectuation. Studying the behaviour of experienced entrepreneurs, Sarasvathy observed that they do not necessarily begin with defined goals and then seek the means needed to achieve them. Instead, they begin with the means already available and ask what possibilities might emerge from them, posing simple initial questions: who am I, what can I do and who do I know?
In both perspectives, innovation arises from the recombination and reinterpretation of resources already available.
This is where language, in our argument, becomes decisive. Organisational resources are also interpretative categories. When a capability is reclassified through a new linguistic description, it can acquire a different strategic function. In this sense, language helps to redefine the space of possibilities that the organisation is able to see.
Semantic exaptation can therefore be understood as the moment when emergent strategy and the recombination of available means encounter, through language, a new linguistic classification, making visible opportunities that had previously remained implicit and unexpressed.
To Sarasvathy’s questions, then, we can add another: how can I linguistically redefine what I already have at my disposal?
The engine of change is the ability to produce new linguistic classifications
The true catalyst for this transformation lies in what we have learnt from Karl Weick’s account of sensemaking: organisations do not operate in an objective environment, but “enact” it through the linguistic categories they choose to use.
Semantic exaptation is, first and foremost, an introspective act. Language serves to stabilise the reality of the business and make it usable and visible. If a capability has no name, it is invisible to the CFO, absent from budgets and missing from board discussions. Every new word stabilises a distinction: changing the name of a resource means shifting its centre of gravity in decision-making. When an “operating expense” is renamed, for example, as an “intelligence asset”, the assessment metrics, allocated budgets and political legitimacy within the company change instantly.
Meaning opens up an economic space that did not previously exist or was literally invisible.
Cases of strategic exaptation
Among the most celebrated transformations in modern economic history that we can trace back to this logic of functional reclassification is the weak adhesive that led to the Post-it. What was technically a production failure was semantically reinterpreted as a “removable adhesive”, creating a global product category from a structural flaw.
Or take Amazon, which transformed its Customer Service from a traditional operational “cost centre” into a systematic source of insight, where every complaint is reclassified as a signal for optimising the user experience and identifying flaws in processes. At Amazon we can also see how logistics was transformed from an internal organisational capability into strategic infrastructure for third parties, or how its servers, likewise originally created to meet a primary internal need, became, externally, in the form of AWS, the organisation’s most important business.
Equally famous and recognisable is the case of Patagonia, where technical choices rooted in quality and repairability were reinterpreted as environmental activism. The production structure remained the same; only the narrative frame changed, stabilising the company’s positioning in the market.
A much less well-known case, but one that helps us understand what can happen when the semantic context of a research result changes, is that of PVDC, polyvinylidene chloride. In the 1940s, this material was developed to protect fighter aircraft on aircraft carriers from salt spray, thanks to its extraordinary ability to prevent air and moisture from passing through.
About a decade later, it became clear that this property could also be read in the opposite direction: not only preventing air and moisture from entering, but also preventing aromas from escaping. Once its colour and odour had been eliminated, the material was reinterpreted as a high-barrier coating for paper and multilayer plastic films used to package food products whose aroma needs to be preserved, such as biscuits. In this way, under the trade name Saran, PVDC became a true global leader in the sector.
From efficiency to creative redundancy
The principal enemy of exaptation is the obsession with extreme efficiency. Methodologies such as Lean or Six Sigma, while improving operational efficiency, often act as agents of evolutionary pruning, systematically eliminating the redundancies that represent the strategic options of the future.
To encourage semantic exaptation, leaders can adopt a more deliberate approach. A first step is to suspend judgement temporarily on the current function of the organisation’s resources. Rather than simply asking what an asset does today, it is useful to ask what else it might do if the context changed.
Another interesting exercise is to ask managers to describe their departments or assets without using their traditional names. In a kind of semantic hackathon, “Legal” might become “Risk Intelligence”, “IT” might be reinterpreted as “Operational Agility”, while “Maintenance” might be defined as “Asset Longevity”. In doing so, through the new linguistic definition, it becomes possible to observe in real time the change in investment priorities and in the way a function is perceived within the organisation.
A further step could involve systematically mapping peripheral competences and technologies: those that currently appear marginal or underused. Rather than eliminating them in the name of efficiency, it may be useful to protect them as reservoirs of future possibilities: as though they were feathers before the need to fly.
Circular research also means finding the hidden value in what is already known
Conducting research is not the only way to create value. Innovating also means looking with fresh eyes at what is already there. The seeds of your organisation’s next revolution may be hidden in resources that have long existed but have, until now, remained trapped in obsolete linguistic definitions.
The task of contemporary management is to break these cognitive frames and make the organisation’s latent potential visible through new classifications of meaning.
References
Gould, S. J. and Vrba, E. S. (1982), Exaptation: A Term for a Neglected Aspect of Evolutionary Morphology, Paleobiology, Vol. 8, No. 1.
Mintzberg, H. and Waters, B. (1985), Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3.
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008), Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise, Edward Elgar Publishing.
Weick, K. E. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage Publications.