Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship – An Evolutionary Learning Perspective

Abstract

The paper extends the argument (Reschke 2005b,c,d; Reschke and Kraus 2005) that strategy and strategic management can be seen as elements of a process of social evolution based on a model of systemic evolution that considers feedback on developments from the perception of actors. After introducing our perspective on strategy, we introduce theoretical perspectives from economics, (strategic) management, evolutionary biology and psychology in section two. In the third section we build a link between micro and macro-levels based on an evolutionary conception of organisational change and the impact of perception giving rise to an evolutionary learning model. In section four we develop an evolutionary model of economic competition, which is based on population ecology. Here, evolutionary developments are seen as a result of strategizing by actors. We argue that this process can give rise to a baseline model of industry evolution and its deviations. We link the foregoing discussion to strategic management and give an outlook on further potentially fruitful areas of integration between evolutionary perspectives and strategic issues such as strategic groups and globalization.

Keywords: innovation, strategy, industry, learning, evolution, evolutionary economics, institutional economics