Technology as a Complex Exaptive System: Some Evidence from US Patent Data

Abstract

Despite their pervasiveness in the history of economic change, market-defining innovations are rarely highlighted. In this paper the concept of exaptation is proposed as a mechanism that lies behind the redeployment of technologies into new markets and, therefore, behind the emergence of market-defining innovations. The concept of exaptation, originating from studies on natural evolution, refers to the case in which an organism develops a trait optimized for a specific function, but then the trait gets diverted for a completely different use. Recently, the concept has gained increasing attention in innovation studies, since it provides a theoretical basis that can help to address the pervasive and serendipitous redeployment of technologies into new domains of use. Despite the increasing attention paid to exaptation in the innovation literature, current research provides an incomplete analysis of the micro-processes underlying the emergence of exaptation. In this paper, we fill this gap by exploring the impact that technical constraints exert on the micro-processes of invention that eventually lead to the emergence of exaptation. To test our hypotheses, we rely on an empirical setting based on US patent data.