The secrets of beauty: open and recombinative : a novel approach to the management of innovation

This is a new approach and adds to previous contributions over the issues, such as, for instance, the Corning case (Cattani, 2006), where the innovation strategy of the firm is shaped by preadaptive processes of internal knowledge reuse for accomplishing new market demand. Our work shows that triggering factors of exaptation processes can be unused patents or dormant business agreements with leading firms operating in other close or distant sectors, generating opportunities for narrow or extensive internally- or externally-driven exaptation. The empirical setting is L’Oréal, the world leader in the beauty industry. We reconstruct the historical pattern of innovations developed by the firm, by means of a collection of information coming from secondary sources.2 In particular, we identify the conditions that allowed L’Oréal to enter the nutricosmetics arena, by means of the creation of a new product out of an exaptation process.