Exaptation at Work Seeing fresh potential in what exists

Some of the most interesting innovations don’t start with a clear plan. They begin as something else entirely. A feature or tool developed for one purpose ends up being used in a new and unexpected way. This is known as exaptation.

What interests me about exaptation is how it demonstrates that progress often arises from reinterpreting what’s already around us. Instead of building something new from scratch, we find new uses for existing things. Sometimes this happens by accident, and at other times, it occurs through a shift in perspective. This pattern is observed in biology, technology, and organizational life.

A recent example is how GPUs, developed initially for rendering graphics in video games, became central to the rise of artificial intelligence. Their architecture happened to be well-suited for training large neural networks, even though that was not the original intention. That kind of shift from one domain to another captures the spirit of exaptation.

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