Intro Part I - Exaptation and Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS)

An Introduction to Exaptation, Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS), and Exaptation AI

The assets you already own can do things nobody designed them to do. Finding those functions is a search problem and it can be done on purpose.

By Shripal Shah, DBA | Founder, Exaptation AI

In 1945, Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer was standing near a magnetron - the vacuum tube at the heart of wartime radar - when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. The magnetron was built to power radar systems that detect aircraft. By 1947, Raytheon was selling it to cook food. The tube had not changed. What it did and what it was for had.

That shift has a name: exaptation. It is one of the oldest mechanisms in nature and one of the least understood sources of growth in business. This post introduces three connected ideas: exaptation, the phenomenon; Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS), a research-backed theory to intentionally search for it; and Exaptation AI (ExAI), the company and platform built to make that search scalable.

What Is Exaptation?

Exaptation is what happens when something that already exists; such as, a biological trait, a technology, or a company asset takes on a new function it was never designed for. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba coined the term in 1982, but the idea is older; Darwin called it a “shift in function.” The simplest business translation is one resource, many functions.

Nature is full of it. Feathers appeared first as insulation and safety covers; flight and display came later, built on structures that already existed. Business is full of it too, though we rarely use the word.

•      Post-it Notes. In 1968, a 3M scientist produced an adhesive that stuck weakly and peeled off. It was a failure for a company trying to make strong glue for the aerospace industry. Six years later, a colleague used it to hold a bookmark in his hymnal. The product launched nationally in 1980: twelve years from discovery to market.

•      Google Search. Hyperlinks were designed for navigation. Click here, go there. Larry Page and Sergey Brin saw that the web’s link structure could also serve as a citation network: a page linked to by many important pages is probably important itself. Ranking pages and the resultant Search tool was a function no one had designed the hyperlink to perform.

•      Uber Eats. Uber built a rider app, a driver network, mapping, and payments to move people. In 2014, after continued experimentation, the same components began moving meals. The resource stayed largely the same; its function expanded. Uber’s Delivery segment generated $17.2 billion in revenue in 2025, according to the company’s annual report.

Two distinctions separate exaptation from things that merely resemble it.

First, exaptation is not adaptation. Adaptation is improving something at the job it already does—a faster processor, a better camera, a cheaper delivery route. Exaptation is the same thing doing a genuinely different job.

Second, exaptation is not “same product, new market.” Selling an existing product into a new industry or geography changes who uses it, not what it does. A useful test: did the verb change? Radar detected aircraft; the microwave heats food. Hyperlinks navigate; PageRank does search. If only the customer changed, you have expansion, not exaptation.

Why should organizations care? Because these examples share an uncomfortable feature: they were accidents, and they were slow. Post-its took twelve years. The microwave took decades to reach most kitchens. Psychologists have a name for why we miss such opportunities—functional fixedness, the tendency to see an object only in terms of its pre-existing, designed purpose. Every organization has it. The question is whether it has to.

What Is Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS)?

Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS) is a strategic management theory and a practical process for finding exaptations in an organization’s existing assets and resources - intentionally rather than by luck - and turning them into growth. I developed it as part of the doctoral dissertation at Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School (2024). The research drew on exaptation scholarship across biology, complexity science, innovation, and management, plus six case studies: Uber Eats; Google Search; Subsea fiber-optic cables that now detect earthquakes; naval seamount catalogs that later served climate research; a Stanford classroom challenge; and a cautionary case in which LinkedIn’s professional network was used for dating. Emergence of a new function does not guarantee value or growth, so strategy matters!

In the Stanford case, teams received $5 and two hours to make as much money as possible, then three minutes to present to the class. The winning team made $650 by ignoring the $5 and selling their presentation slot to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford students. The slot was designed for reporting results; its most valuable function was advertising. Everyone in the room held the same asset. One team saw what it could do.

The EGS model explains how that happens. Every exaptation begins with a resource and its properties, including properties nobody has catalogued. Beneath the resource sit the natural phenomena that make it work: physical, social, market, or technological forces. Agents—the people using the resource—bring their own goals and problems to it. And selective pressures such as time, competition, regulation, and technology shifts change the context and push agents to use the resource differently. When a new pattern of use stabilizes and spreads, a new function has emerged.

EGS also catalogs the recurring causes of emergence: The theory calls them Value Discovery Mechanisms. A product manager notices customers using a feature in an unintended way. A data anomaly (an earthquake’s signature in a fiber cable’s signal) prompts someone to ask why. A team under time pressure spots an asset others treat as a formality. Knowing the causes turns hoping for serendipity into a list of places to look.

From there, EGS relies on practices most firms already run: product-market fit (PMF), business experiments, and market entry. Five of the six cases found their new value in a different market. That is why EGS frames the work as value generation because it is about discovering, creating, delivering, capturing, and sharing value. It is not an efficiency program: This is not doing more with less. It is doing more with more, where the “more” is potential already inside assets you own. Growth is a search problem, and EGS is the map. Its six-step process is the subject of a later post.