Abstract
Building on Penrose’s intuition about unused services as the engine of firms’ growth, we focus on technology resources and measure the potential of technology resources to generate unused services. We show that the emergence of unused services depends on the affordances of technological resources and call the set of unused services a residual. From a strategic viewpoint the residual is a bundle of shadow options. Examining how the residual emerges and unfolds sheds light on how shadow options may be converted into real options.