Strategy, Information Organization and Knowledge Evolution - Perspectives on Strategy and Innovation from Social and Natural Sciences

This paper draws together research and perspectives developed by strategists and strategy researchers, economists, sociologists, biologists and physicists. Conceptually, it is based upon a `epistemological-cognitive' interpretation of evolution as learning process that accumulates information and transforms it into `knowledge' via codification and structural organization of this knowledge (Riedl 2000). Strategy and management as a process of social evolution are about the selection and recombination of new variants in often modular and complex social and material structures, which are in turn influenced by actors' perceptions about these structures. These material elements and their mental representations are selected and recombined during processes of social evolution and in need of be adapted to each other, which may explain the particular paths of social developments in the past