Pierpaolo Andriani - Exaptation, Complexity & Technological Innovation

This month, the wonderful Pierpaolo Andriani joins us to discuss several key themes in complexity topics. This session will explore exaptation, a pivotal yet underappreciated evolutionary mechanism driving innovation, particularly in technology but extending beyond it.

Exaptation can be understood as the conjugate or complement of adaptation. While adaptation refers to the improvement of an artifact’s fitness for a pre-defined function, exaptation concerns the emergence of new functions in artifacts that were neither designed nor evolved for those functions. The origins of the concept are ancient, reaching back to the atomists of classical Greece, and later re-emerging in the work of Charles Darwin.

Exaptation is inherently tied to complexity theory, as it represents and models the intrinsic capacity of artifacts to extend into the adjacent possible of the economy—even when, and especially when, such adjacent possibilities remain invisible to the community of scientists working in those areas. These exaptive innovations often underpin major technological discontinuities, which will be examined in this talk.

Stuart Kauffman has noted that exaptations are inherently unprestatable—they escape anticipation. In this way, exaptation represents the manifestation of emergence in innovation.

Bio
Pierpaolo Andriani is Professor in Complexity and Innovation Management at Kedge Business School, France. He got his BA/MSc in Physics. He started his career as a scientist in industrial R&D. He received his Ph.D. in the social sciences from Durham University, UK. His current research interests focus on evolutionary models of innovation and, in particular, on exaptation. On exaptation, he has published in journals such as: Organization Science, Research Policy, Industrial & Corporate Change, and Complexity.

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This event will be recorded. The event link will be published on meetup.com 1 hour prior.

Please note the time slot- this is an afternoon event for those of you on EST (12:00 noon to 2:00 pm).