Creating new value through repurposing digital innovations

Increasingly, digital ventures generate new value through repurposing existing digital capabilities once encountering new business contexts. However, we know little about such encounters and the process by which a digital innovation is repurposed across multiple business contexts. To this end, we develop a new perspective for understanding repurposing as process of making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable within and across business contexts. We draw on an in-depth case study of a firm offering a digital platform, which was repurposed across different business contexts with multiple value encounters. In studying these value encounters, we identified three recurring practices for making a product-agnostic digital innovation valuable: platform-inspired envisioning; reconditioning digital capabilities; formulating value narratives. Our new theoretical perspective contributes to the literatures on digital innovation and value creation. First, we contribute to prior technology and innovation studies by capturing and theorizing a new form of recombination, which we label repurposing. The notion of repurposing offers a new way of understanding how digital capabilities can be recombined to offer values across product and market boundaries. Second, we contribute to the digital innovation literature by developing a process model that articulates the dynamics by which digital technology can be repurposed to generate value in innovation across multiple contexts.