Before you can decide what to build versus buy, you need to see, honestly, how invented versus commoditised each piece already is.
Simon Wardley developed the technique around 2005 while running a business unit and struggling to answer a basic question no framework he’d found could answer well: “does this strategy actually make sense?” His solution was a map with two axes — a value chain (what depends on what, from user need down to underlying infrastructure) and an evolution axis (how far each component has moved from a novel, custom-built “genesis” toward a standardised, interchangeable “commodity”). A component’s position on that evolution axis is a strong signal for whether it should be built in-house, bought off the shelf, or something in between — which is exactly the build-vs-buy judgment this essay’s “evolving tech” thinking is reaching for.
Wardley Mapping has no peer-reviewed academic literature behind it — it comes directly from Wardley’s own writing, published as a free, openly-licensed book and blog rather than through a journal. That’s worth stating plainly rather than dressing it up with an unrelated citation: it’s a widely-used practitioner framework, not an academic one, and its authority rests on adoption and case use, not peer review.
Source: Wardley, S., Wardley Maps (ongoing, first published ~2016), freely available at wardleymaps.com — a primary practitioner source, not peer-reviewed.