“Exaptation is the least risky way to innovate”
— Dave Snowden, The Cynefin Company
Exaptation is ‘a shift in function of a trait during evolution’. Put more simply, this means something existing becoming connected/utilised/remade in a potentially beneficial but originally unintended way.
Your ability to innovate is constrained by an habitual tendency to define, categorise and reductively analyse based on habit and convention.
To actively exapt means shifting to a multi-ontology approach. To think about what-you’ve-got and how-it-connects. With an openness to shift between interior properties and exterior capacities. And when intervening, obliquely.
Ask yourself
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What do you know?
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How do you know it?
The potential for businesses looking to innovate within ecosystems lies in shifting philosophy from organising-by-properties to comprehending-capacities. Bringing a multiplicity of new ways to explore, speculate, ideate, design, build and exploit.
Businesses can draw on new approaches, techniques and even philosophies. Assemblage theory, category theory, new materialism, the rhizome and the machinic to attempt to better understand the evolutionary potential of the present.
