Effective Reuse Strategies in New Product Development
Saideh Alaei, Harris Kyriakou · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025
Most product innovation endeavours include building upon and reusing existing artifacts. As a result, understanding how the reuse of a product’s form and function will affect the subsequent use of resulting products is essential for devising effective product development processes. This study provides insights on effective reuse strategies by examining how the degree of form and functional dissimilarity of a product to the products that the designer built upon—also referred to as parent products—affects its use. We theoretically and empirically contribute to the existing literature by developing a novel framework of reuse strategies that encapsulates the form and functional dissimilarities of products to their parent products, namely reuse for i) replication, ii) adaptation, iii) exaptation, and iv) transformation. Subsequently, these strategies are empirically examined on Thingiverse, the largest open-source hardware community to date. Our findings provide strong evidence that exaptation strategies—developing products with a high functional dissimilarity to their parent products—lead to products with higher use, whereas adaptation and transformation strategies result in products with lower use. This study contributes by unearthing the distinct, antithetical, and effective reuse strategies required when developing widely used products and concludes by discussing implications for both research and practice.