INNOVATION VIA SERENDIPITY ?
Professor Pierpaolo ANDRIANI
KEDGE Business School
Conference Lift video : "Makers, Design and Exaptation"
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by chance. He noticed an unusual pattern in some discarded petri dishes that should have long before been washed and reutilized. Penicillin and the antibiotic revolution constituted the most important medical discovery of the 20th century.
Spencer, a self-taught engineer working at Raytheon, noticed in 1945 that a magnetron, the source of microwave radiation in a radar, cooked a chocolate bar in his pocket, absent any source of heat. Two years later the first microwave oven went for sale in the US.
We call the approach in which an existing technology gives rise to a new function and often to a new market exaptation.
Discovery by exaptation (and serendipity) has played an important role in the past but does it still matter? Can discovery by exaptation help organizations become more innovative?
To answer these questions, we studied the emergence of new uses in a sample of novel drugs (all drugs approved in the US in the period 1998-2000) to ascertain the percentage of uses that emerged unexpectedly by chance observation.
It turns out that a drug generates at least about 6 new uses after market introduction, of which about 40% are unexpected and functionally novel, that is, functionally distant from the approved use. A fraction of the emergent uses is radical as it leads to new treatment for previously untreated diseases and often to new science. For instance, in our sample, rapamycin, a natural compound found in the Easter Islands and originally used as a vermifuge, has become the most important drug used to prevent rejection in newly transplanted organs but even more astonishingly is currently under study as a pill that may slow down or even revert ageing. Sildenafil, commonly known as Viagra, is too well known to be retold. Other cases, such as that of thalidomide, that was withdrawn from the market for causing devastating malformations in newborns, has reacquired a new lease of life for curing some forms of leprosies. Many more examples could be given.
What seems to emerge from our research is that the exposure of existing technologies to different contexts may reveal unexpected features that enable the emergence of new market functions with significant business and entrepreneurial implications. Interestingly, the larger the distance between the original and the new context, the higher the impact of the new function. See the transition of the military magnetron into a kitchen appliance. We conclude that existing technologies and products have a hidden wealth of technological options that can become the basis for new businesses.
However, a cursory look at new product development managerial practices shows that invention-by-exaptation is absent from textbooks. In the pharma context, despite the potential of cheaper, faster and safer drug development, only the tiny niche of drug ‘repurposing’ (or ‘repositioning’) companies routinely practice innovation-by-exaptation. More in general lead-users and innovation communities do routinely recycle technologies and products, often discovering new creative uses for them, but we know little about how and how frequently it happens.
The implications of innovation-by-exaptation on sustainability and New Product Development are promising but under-explored.
