Aligning the generative nature of digital technologies with an organization’s purpose raises relevant questions in management and organization studies regarding the strategic positioning of digital technology. Generativity refers to the ability of a technology of producing unprompted change driven by uncoordinated audiences: how this shapes organizations’ decision-making and aligns with their strategic objectives remains largely unexplored. By focusing on an extreme case – the BBC, an organization with an early and strong public purpose – we can activate and observe key organizational processes and phenomena more transparently. Through an evolutionary lens of generativity, we identify distinct mechanisms (fulfilling, delimiting, enhancing, filtering, leveraging, reinforcing) through which a generative technology yields opportunities that are selected and retained over time as the organization delivers its purpose. We develop a model and suggest that there exists a mutual impact between the unprompted change triggered by the generative nature of digital technologies and the behavior of a range of varied audiences interacting with these technologies, which cuts across value proposition, the breadth and nature of technological opportunities, and organizational learning in the form of changing processes or structures. We demonstrate how, while generativity offers ‘variation’ of innovation opportunities, the organizational purpose acts as an internal ‘selection mechanism’ in a classic evolutionary sense, providing feedback on the suitability of specific courses of action, shaping and redefining an organization’s purpose.
