:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Evolutionary process as Innovation

“Evolution is a method for searching enormous, almost infinitely large spaces of possible designs for the almost infinitesimally small fraction of designs that are "fit" according to their particular purpose and environment.” Beinhocker (2006)

Analogy Map

Principle/Function	Biological evolution	Innovation
Create (random) variation	Mutations, recombination	Multiple prototypes, variation on existing products
ExampleTest and select what works	Natural selection	Market research, selection by producers and retailers, Preferences of consumers
Retain and multiply what works	Reproduction and inheritance	Production for the (mass) market, copying by other companies

Quote Bank

Beinhocker (2006):

“We are accustomed to thinking of evolution in a biological context, but modern evolutionary theory views evolution as something much more general. Evolution is an algorithm; it is an all-purpose formula for innovation, a formula that, through its special brand of trial and error, creates new designs and solves difficult problems. Evolution can perform its tricks not just in the "substrate" of DNA, but in any system that has the right information processing and information-storage characteristics. In short, evolution’s simple recipe of "differentiate, select, and amplify" is a type of computer program— a program for creating novelty, knowledge, and growth. Because evolution is a form of information processing, it can do its order-creating work in realms ranging from computer software to the mind, to human culture, and to the economy.”

“Consider the shirt [...] you are wearing—where did its design come from? Well, you might reply, it's obvious; a clothes designer designed it. But there is more to the story than just that. What really happened was more or less the following. A number of clothes designers took preexisting ideas of what a shirt should look like and used their rationality and creativity to create all sorts of variations of "shirts" and sketched them out. Those clothes designers then looked at their various sketches and selected a subset of the designs that they thought consumers would like, and made a limited number of samples. The designers then showed those samples to the management of a clothing company, which selected a subset of the designs that it thought consumers would like, and arranged for their manufacture. The clothing company then showed its wares to various retailers, which likewise selected a subset of the designs that they thought consumers would like. With orders in hand, the clothing company then scaled up its manufacturing and supplied the retailer with the shirts. You then walked into a store, browsed through a wide variety of shirts, and selected the one you liked and bought it. Differentiation of designs, selection according to some criterion of fitness, and amplification or scaling up of the successful designs to the next stage of the process—all of this happened both within the clothing company itself and within the overall fashion marketplace. Your shirt was not designed; it was evolved. But why does the fashion industry go through this iterative, and in many ways, wasteful, process? The reason that your shirt was evolved rather than designed is that no one could predict exactly what kind of shirt you would want out of the almost infinite space of possible shirt designs.”

Harford (2011):

“In a market economy, variation and selection are also at work. New ideas are created by scientists and engineers, meticulous middle managers in large corporations or daring entrepreneurs. Failures are culled because bad ideas do not survive long in the marketplace: to succeed, you have to make a product that customers wish to buy at a price that covers costs and beats obvious competitors. Many ideas fail these tests, and if they are not shut down by management they will eventually be shut down by a bankruptcy court. Good ideas spread because they are copied by competitors, because staff leave to set up their own businesses, or because the company with the good ideas grows.”

Kell & Lurie-Luke (2015):

“we find that an evolutionary metaphor captures all of the necessary hallmarks of innovation in an accessible and accurate manner… For example, both technologies and scientific discoveries follow evolutionary trends in the form of change, typically improvement, with time”

References

Analogies for Sustainable Development