Strategic Agility, Exaptation, and Business Model Innovation: The Case of an SME

Abstract

This study adopts a process view on business model innovation (BMI) to address multiple issues pertaining to theory and practice. First, BMI is challenging for most firms in part due to resource constraints that impose limitations on activities for opportunity identification and resource acquisition. To overcome these constraints, exaptation has recently been proposed by scholars as a way to innovate business models through the utilization of existing resources in new domains. However, research to date on exaptation in the context of BMI is limited with inadequate attention to the conditions that lead to exaptation. Second, in line with this research gap, scholars call for further process studies on BMI to explore the role of and the interdependencies among the antecedents in different contexts. To resolve these issues, this article investigates how strategic agility, an established organizational antecedent in the literature, leads to BMI through exaptation with a qualitative, in-depth, single-case study on an small to medium-sized enterprise (SME). The findings of this study are threefold. First, the BMI process in the case unfolds in line with the stages of exaptation proposed in the literature. Second, the relationship between the underlying elements of strategic agility (SA) and BMI is highly complex and at times reciprocal, with SA and BMI switching roles in the causal relationship along the process. Third, strategic sensitivity and resource fluidity, two of the three metacapabilities underlying SA, in combination trigger exaptation, which leads to BMI. Therefore, this study proposes strategic agility as an enabling capability for exaptation.