Thirteen Strategy Frameworks, One Unasked Question
Where does Exaptation Growth Strategy sit on the strategy shelf? And, which of the classics it works with, not against.
Every experienced management team owns a shelf of strategy frameworks. Porter's five forces from the MBA years. A dog-eared copy of Blue Ocean Strategy from an offsite. Jobs to Be Done from the product organization. 7 Powers from the board member who invests. Each one arrived with the quiet implication that it was the frame. Each one, used well, genuinely earns its place.
The mistake is treating them as rivals. A framework is not an answer; it is a question, engineered to be asked at the right moment. Porter is not "better" than Christensen any more than a torque wrench is better than a level. The real diagnostic for a leadership team is not which framework do we believe in but which questions are we asking and which question is going unasked entirely.
This post sorts thirteen of the most widely used strategy frameworks by the question each one puts to a management team. Twelve of them are classics. The thirteenth — Exaptation Growth Strategy (EGS), the framework we develop and build tooling for at Exaptation AI, exists because one question turned out to have no owner: what else can the things we already own do?
Sort the shelf by the question, not the fame.
Line the thirteen up by their central question and a structure appears that the usual "framework wars" completely obscure. Almost every framework on the shelf asks you to name a destination before you set out, then organizes the journey toward it.
Four of them are fundamentally about choosing where to compete. Competitive Strategy (Porter, 1980) asks how to position against rivals within an industry whose structure you can diagnose. Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim & Mauborgne, 2005) asks what uncontested market space you can create. The Product-Market Growth Matrix (Ansoff, 1957) asks which of four product-market directions to pursue, sorted by risk. Playing to Win (Lafley & Martin, 2013) forces the whole thing into an explicit cascade: winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, capabilities, systems. All four are destination-first: you declare the target market or position, then work backward.
Two more are about anticipating trajectories over time. Disruptive Innovation (Christensen, 1997) asks where a simpler, cheaper offer can gain a foothold and improve. Three Horizons (Baghai, Coley & White, 1999) asks how to balance today's core against tomorrow's options. It tells you how much to spend on the future, not what the future should be.
Four look inward at what the firm already has. The Resource-Based View (Barney, 1991) asks which resources can underpin durable advantage. Dynamic Capabilities (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997) asks what the firm must sense, seize, and reconfigure as conditions change. 7 Powers (Helmer, 2016) asks which structural advantages produce persistent differential returns. The Flywheel (Collins, 2001) asks what reinforcing sequence compounds when repeated. These come closest to EGS in gaze as they stare at the same assets and capabilities. But every one of them asks a question about advantage, renewal, or momentum in roles the firm already understands.
And then there are three that refuse to name the destination at all.
Ten frameworks name the destination. Three discover it.
Jobs to Be Done, Effectuation, and Exaptation Growth Strategy share a stance the other ten do not: the goal is an output of the process, not an input to it. They are discovery frameworks. But they search very different things.
Jobs to Be Done (Ulwick, 1990s; Christensen et al., 2016) searches the customer's circumstance. What progress is this person trying to make, and what would they "hire" to make it? The asset is whatever you build after the job is found. It is demand-side discovery.
Effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001) searches for a goal that fits the means in hand. Who am I, what do I know, whom do I know, and what becomes possible as stakeholders commit? The destination changes as the venture forms. It is discovery of ends from means.
Exaptation Growth Strategy (Shah, 2024) searches the asset itself for a function nobody designed it to perform. Exaptation - a term borrowed from evolutionary biology - describes the moment when something built for one purpose turns out to create value doing another. Feathers evolved for insulation before any creature flew. In business, the pattern is everywhere once you have a name for it: EGS turns that pattern from an accident you read about into a search you can run by inventorying the assets, surfacing candidate functions, testing them in market, and growing the ones that prove out.
The three fit together as a spine: JTBD searches the customer, Effectuation searches for a goal that fits the means, EGS searches the means for an undesigned function. (The JTBD–EGS pairing deserves its own treatment later in this series.)
The map in practice: which frameworks matter most next to EGS
The diagram accompanying this post arranges all twelve classics by their distance from the EGS question. Four rings, from nearest kin to a different axis entirely.
Exaptation AI · EGS proximity map · v1.0
Twelve frameworks, measured from one question
Strategy frameworks are questions, not rivals. This map arranges twelve classics by how close each comes to the question Exaptation Growth Strategy exists to ask — from nearest kin to a different axis entirely.
The anchor question
Exaptation Growth Strategy
Shah, 2024
“What else can this asset do?” — searches assets the firm already owns for functions nobody designed them to perform, then tests whether each one generates value in market.
Ring 1 · Nearest kin
●●●○ proximityShare the discovery stance: the destination is an output of the process, not an input. They differ from EGS only in what they search.
Searches the customer’s circumstance; EGS searches the asset. The demand-side twin of the same discovery instinct.
Starts from means in hand and lets a goal emerge; EGS starts from means and searches for one specific thing — a new function.
Ring 2 · Same gaze, different question
●●○○ proximityStare at exactly the objects EGS stares at — assets and capabilities — but ask about advantage and renewal in roles the firm already understands.
Audits assets for defensible advantage in their known roles; EGS audits the same assets for roles nobody has yet named.*
Builds the organizational capacity to reconfigure; EGS supplies concrete, tested objects for that capacity to act on.*
Ring 3 · Downstream partners
●○○○ proximityNot alternatives — a relay team. Once EGS surfaces and validates a new function, these frameworks finally have their input.
Tests whether the discovered function can be defended. EGS originates; Powers protect.
Positions the new function within its industry — once the industry is known.
Frames the market space a discovered function opens up.*
Converts a validated function into explicit where-to-play / how-to-win choices.
Locates the new function on the growth grid — often diversification, entered with a proven asset rather than a leap of faith.*
Ring 4 · A different axis
○○○○ proximityGovern timing, momentum, and trajectory rather than the object of search.
Sets how much to invest in future options; validated exaptation candidates are one disciplined source of Horizon 2 and 3 bets.*
Compounds execution once a function is proven; says nothing about where new functions come from.
Tracks designed offers improving toward a named target — an adaptation story, and the crispest contrast to exaptation.
Ring 1 — nearest kin. Jobs to Be Done and Effectuation share the discovery stance. If your organization already runs JTBD interviews or thinks effectually about new ventures, EGS will feel native: it is the same intellectual humility about destinations, pointed at a different search space.
Ring 2 — same gaze, different question. The Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities look at exactly the objects EGS looks at. RBV audits assets for defensible advantage in their known roles; EGS audits the same assets for roles nobody has yet named.* Dynamic Capabilities builds the organizational capacity to reconfigure; EGS supplies concrete, tested objects for that capacity to act on.* These two are the natural academic neighbors — and the reason EGS reads as an extension of the resource tradition rather than a repudiation of it.
Ring 3 — downstream partners. This is the ring executives should care about most, because it is where the frameworks stop being alternatives and start being a relay team. Once EGS surfaces and validates a new function, the destination-first classics finally have their input: 7 Powers tests whether the new function can be defended (we ran that full analysis in the previous post in this series); Porter positions it within its industry once the industry is known; Blue Ocean frames the market space it opens;* Playing to Win converts it into explicit choices; Ansoff locates it on the growth grid — often landing in the "diversification" cell, historically the riskiest quadrant, but entered with an asset already proven in a new role rather than a leap of faith.*
Ring 4 — a different axis. Three Horizons, the Flywheel, and Disruptive Innovation govern timing, momentum, and trajectory rather than the object of search. Three Horizons tells you how much to invest in future options; validated exaptation candidates are one disciplined source of Horizon 2 and 3 bets.* The Flywheel compounds execution once a function is proven as it says nothing about where new functions come from. Disruptive Innovation is the instructive contrast: it tracks designed offers improving along a known performance trajectory. That is an adaptation story because it is a deliberate improvement toward a named target.
The relay-team view is not theoretical. Consider the most public example: Uber built a driver network, routing engine, and payments stack for moving people. The same asset base turned out to perform a second, undesigned function of delivering food. Per Uber's Q2 2026 results (reported August 5, 2026), Delivery generated $27.5 billion in gross bookings against Mobility's $29.0 billion. The discovered business is now within roughly five percent of the designed one. Everything downstream of that discovery from defending it, positioning it, and scaling it was Ring 3 and Ring 4 work. But no destination-first framework, run in 2014 on the question "where should we compete," reliably produces "restaurant delivery" from a rides company's war room.* The function had to be found before the classics could go to work. The same relay ran at Nvidia, where chips designed to render game graphics were found performing a second function - general-purpose parallel computation - that the company then deliberately cultivated until it became the substrate of modern AI.
One caution, because it is the most common misreading: none of this is about efficiency. EGS is not "sweat your assets" or "do more with less." Squeezing more output from a known function is optimization. It is valuable, finite, and someone else's framework. EGS finds new functions, which create new demand. The motto is do more with more: more functions, more markets, more value from the same balance sheet.
Why the question goes unasked
If the question is that valuable, why doesn't anyone own it? Two reasons, one cognitive and one structural.
The cognitive one has a seventy-year research pedigree: functional fixedness, first documented in Karl Duncker's 1945 candle-box experiments, is the deeply human tendency to see an object only in terms of its designed use. Organizations institutionalize it because the asset documentation, the org chart, and the P&L all file every asset under the function it was bought for.
The structural one is simpler: every framework on the shelf assigns its question to someone. Porter's question belongs to strategy teams, JTBD's to product, RBV's to the board. "What else can this asset do?" belongs to no function, no review cycle, and no line item. So it gets asked by accident, if at all.* That gap is precisely what EGS formalizes as a discipline, and what we are building Exaptation AI to industrialize: if growth is a search problem, the search should be systematic, not serendipitous.
The full thirteen-framework comparison table contains the question, growth mechanism, aim, and what each framework is best at is available for reference. Just ask.
The bottom line
Nearly every planning tool your company uses begins the same way: decide where you want to end up, then work out how to get there. That works and you should keep doing it. But it leaves one profitable question with no owner: the things you already paid for may be able to do jobs nobody bought them for, and some of those jobs are worth billions. The companies in this post didn't find their second businesses by picking a destination; they found them by looking hard at what was already in the building and testing what it could do. The tools you know remain essential for defending and scaling whatever you find. What most companies are missing is not another way to choose a direction. They are missing a deliberate, repeatable way to discover directions they couldn't have named. That is the gap this work exists to close.
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Claims marked with an asterisk (*) are working interpretations we are actively testing against our case library, not settled findings. Framework characterizations summarize each framework by its central question, not its full content; several have been applied more broadly than one paragraph can show. Uber figures: Uber Technologies Q2 2026 results, August 5, 2026.