The Emergence of Emerging Technologies

What is discontinuous about the moment of radical technological change? We suggest that the discontinuity typically does not lie in a radical advancement in technology itself; rather, the discontinuity stems from a shift of an existing technical lineage to a new domain of application. Seeming revolutions such as wireless communication and the internet did not stem from an isolated technical breakthrough. Rather, the spectacular commercial impact was achieved when an existing technology was re-applied in a new application domain. We use the biological notion of speciation events, which form the basis for the theory of punctuated equilibrium, to reconcile the process of incremental change within a given line of technical development with the radical change associated with the shift of an existing technology to a new application domain. We then use this lens to explore how managers can cope with, and potentially exploit, such change processes

Ancient technology and punctuated change: Detecting the emergence of the Edomite Kingdom in the Southern Levant.

While the punctuated equilibrium model has been employed in paleontological and archaeological research, it has rarely been applied for technological and social evolution in the Holocene. Using metallurgical technologies from the Wadi Arabah (Jordan/Israel) as a case study, we demonstrate a gradual technological development (13th-10th c. BCE) followed by a human agency-triggered punctuated "leap" (late-10th c. BCE) simultaneously across the entire region (an area of ~2000 km2). Here, we present an unparalleled, diachronic archaeometallurgical dataset focusing on elemental analysis of dozens of well-dated slag samples. Based on the results, we suggest punctuated equilibrium provides an innovative theoretical model for exploring ancient technological changes in relation to larger sociopolitical conditions-in the case at hand the emergence of biblical Edom-, exemplifying its potential for more general cross-cultural applications

Darwinism, probability and complexity : market-based organizational transformation and change explained through the theories of evolution

The study of transformation and change is one of the most important areas of social science research. This paper synthesizes and critically reviews the emerging traditions in the study of change dynamics. Three mainstream theories of evolution are introduced to explain change: the Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest, the Probability model and the Complexity approach. The literature review provides a basis for development of research questions that search for a more comprehensive understanding of organizational change. The paper concludes by arguing for the development of a complementary research tradition, which combines an evolutionary and organizational analysis of transformation and change

Industrial Relations System Transformation

This paper analyzes the concept of “transformation” that many allege has occurred recently in a wide variety of national industrial relations systems. After a summary of the debate, with particular reference to the contentious case of Germany, the authors attempt to develop a definition of industrial relations system transformation on the basis of biological analogies and, in particular, the “punctuated equilibrium” theory. They examine the cases of the United States, Sweden, South Africa, and New Zealand, and conclude that the application of the biological frameworks raises a set of fundamental questions that must be addressed in order for the debate over the existence of industrial relations transformation to move forward

Organisational Memetics?: Organisational Learning as a Selection Process

Companies are not only systems created and controlled by those who manage them but also self-organising entities that evolve through learning. Whereas an organism is a creation of natural replicators, genes, an organisation can be seen as a product of an alternative replicator, the meme or mental model, acting, like a gene, to preserve itself in an Evolutionary Stable System. The result is an organisation which self organises around a set of unspoken and unwritten rules and assumptions. Biological evolution is stimulated by environmental change and reproductive isolation; the process of punctuated equilibrium. Corporate innovation shows the same pattern. Innovations in products and processes occur in groups isolated from prevailing mental norms. Successful organic strains possess a genetic capability for adaptation. Organisations which wish to foster learning can develop an equivalent, mental capability. Unlike their biological counterparts they can exert conscious choice and puncture the memetic codes that seek to keep them stable; the mental models of individuals, and the strategies, paradigms and unwritten rules at the company level

Exploring the role of materials in policy change: innovation in low energy housing in the UK

We find and prove new Pohozaev identities and integration by parts type formulas for anisotropic integrodifferential operators of order 2s, with s¿(0,1). These identities involve local boundary terms, in which the quantity (Formula presented.) plays the role that ¿u/¿¿ plays in the second-order case. Here, u is any solution to Lu = f(x,u) in O, with u = 0 in RnO, and d is the distance to ¿O.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Effects of regulation on a self-organized market

Adapting a simple biological model, we study the effects of control on the market. Companies are depicted as sites on a lattice and labelled by a fitness parameter (some `company-size' indicator). The chance of survival of a company on the market at any given time is related to its fitness, its position on the lattice and on some particular external influence, which may be considered to represent regulation from governments or central banks. The latter is rendered as a penalty for companies which show a very fast betterment in fitness space. As a result, we find that the introduction of regulation on the market contributes to lower the average fitness of companies.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

The strategic and the stratigraphic: a working paper on the dynamics of organisational evolution.

Despite large debates over fundamental issues a broadly evolutionary paradigm of organisations is growing in legitimacy. It may though be preferable to replace the metaphor of the organisation as an organism with the literal assertion that both social organisations are ecologies (Weeks and Galunic, 2003). They are still classes of complex systems maintained, and specified by, replicators (or schemata Gell Mann 1994) but the interactor is not necessarily the individual organisation, or population of organisations. Conceptual evolution has been argued as a post-Kuhnian analysis of the scientific process (Hull 1988), a rival economic paradigm (references in Hodgson 1993), a view of strategy (e.g. Lloyd 1990) and an explanation of organisational transformation and learning (Price and Evans 1993, Price 1994, 1995).My concern in this paper is to compare strategic extinction and speciation events in both systems. The stratigraphic record shows a dominant pattern of extinctions and radiative speciations which then settle to stabilised ecosystems. The historical and commercial (or strategigraphic?) record illustrates a similar pattern (Rothschild 1990, Tylecote 1993, Arthur 1994). The causes of extinction events may be genuinely external to the system affected (e.g. asteroid impacts interrupting a reptilian dominated system cannot plausibly be traced to feedback processes in any coupled eco/ lithosphere) or they may be internal when the success of a particular replicator system disturbs a wider systemic balance (e.g. ice-house glaciations terminating plant dominated episodes of earth history). Strategic scale parallels of both forms of extinction event can be seen in commercial and technological history. Keywords Organisational evolution, Punctuated equilibrium, Narrative ecology, memetics