Exaptation: An Unrecognized Mechanism in the Evolutionary Theory of Organizations

Program Session #: 238 | Submission: 10290

Sponsor(s): (OMT, TIM, BPS, ENT)
Date: Saturday, Aug 2 2014 8:00AM - 10:00AM at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Room 203 B

Participants:

• Organizer: Alan D. Meyer; U. of Oregon
• Organizer: Vibha Gaba; INSEAD
• Panelist: Saras D. Sarasvathy; U. of Virginia
• Panelist: Gino Cattani; New York U
• Panelist: Chris Marquis; Harvard U
• Discussant: Philip Anderson; INSEAD
• Discussant: Daniel Levinthal; U. of Pennsylvania
• Discussant: Anne S Miner; U. of Wisconsin, Madison

Exaptation (Gould & Vrba, 1982) refers to the situation in which a useful structure or attribute – despite having arisen for other reasons – is appropriated or co-opted into a new role. For example, Gould argued that the design of feathers was originally an adaptation to enable temperature regulation for birds, one which was subsequently exapted for flight. Exaptation leads to quirky and unpredictable functional shifts, and often produces a history of abrupt transitions that lead down unforeseen evolutionary pathways.

The PDW will explore the claim that adding the concept of exaptation to our theoretical lexicon will open up a middle ground lying between explanations upon doctrinaire natural selection and unfettered human agency. In a nutshell, exaptation offers a substitute for Darwinian metaphysics.

• Sarasvathy and her colleagues have noted that Edison envisioned his phonograph as a business dictation machine, aspirin was used as an analgesic for over a century, and Viagra was developed to treat heart disease — but these inventions were subsequently exapted to become the jukebox, a blood thinner, and a libido-booster.
• Marquis and Huang argue that organizational capabilities that are developed for one purpose can be exapted for another one in a different environment. In their case, US banks that developed capabilities to manage a dispersed branch network subsequently used those capabilities to acquire other banks after a regulatory change.
• Catani argues that exaptation (not necessity) is the mother of invention, at least in the case of fiber optics. Whereas other scholars have argued that superior competitive performance must be attributed to either luck or foresight, Catani shows how novel problems can be solved by transferring (exapting) knowledge already available in-house instead of creating new knowledge from scratch.
• Gaba and Meyer contend that the differential survival of corporate venturing programs after the dot-com bubble popped can be explained by the survivors’ exaptation of skills they had developed prior to the crash as they pursued distinctive forms of organizational learning.