Evolution as a Framework for Strategic Analysis

This chapter explains the suitability of evolution, which is no longer a mere biological concept but a system to knowledge, as a general theoretical framework for strategic analysis. Evolutionary theory, which has achieved the status of a general theory, lends itself to explaining the evolution of a variety of populations of entities in terms of causes and effects. A framework for evolutionary analysis, which is based on the population approach to variational evolution, must provide the conceptual and empirical wherewithal for generating evolutionary accounts of the structural change and/or development of populations. The population approach to variational evolution (or population thinking), which is one of the main methods of evolutionary analysis, entails analysis of a—natural, artificial or hybrid—phenomenon to capture long-term changes to the structure of the associated population(s) of heterogenous entities. It requires identifying population changes as a statistical phenomenon within some common environmental setting. It lends itself to being used as a general tool of analysis to account for all the competition-related changes that occur in a population over a period. The population approach has lent itself to evolutionary analyses of a wide variety of economic populations that may be defined as comprising any of the following entities—economic activities, economic traits, business units, single-business and multi-business firms—provided the collection of entities are characterized by some common economic settings.