Innovation-Oriented Programming: Software Development as a Medium for Exaptation and Implications for the Active Facilitation of Innovation Within Virtual Environments

Abstract

The software domain is an environment that has produced a wide variety of exaptation-based innovations through the repurposing of data, algorithms, and visualizations to problems other than the ones they were originally developed to solve. Unfortunately these innovations have largely been the result of serendipity. Because modern software development is fundamentally aligned to the same principles of evolution that lead to biological innovation—modularity, fluidity, community, diversity, translatability, and combinatorial flexibility—it is an ideal environment in which to leverage our understanding of exaptation to actively facilitate innovations instead of leaving them to chance. Achieving this, however, requires a departure from traditional programming paradigms and the implementation of development systems specifically oriented toward innovation. Preliminary experiments show that when explicit innovation-oriented programming systems and practices are leveraged, innovations occur, suggesting opportunities to leverage the advantages of the virtual domain for the production of both repeatable and scaleable radical innovation.