Considerable debate surrounds the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper contributes to the discussion by bringing in concepts and findings from evolutionary economics. It makes three points. First, adopting an evolutionary market process perspective sheds new light on the nature...

This paper shows how cognitive human dispositions that take effect at the level of an individual firm's corporate culture have repercussions on an industry's evolution. In our theory, the latter is attributable to evolving corporate cultures coupled with changes in a firm's business environment....

This paper relates firm-level processes and size distributions of firms at the industry level. An analytically tractable model explores how firm growth, exit, and spinoff activity in combination with systematically appearing growth crises in organizational development translate into specific...

In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents' evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. Organizations reach a...

We focus on the relationship of age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post war era. Based on trade journals we track the entire firm populations' product portfolio development throughout each firm's lifetime. We distinguish between minor diversification and...

Considerable debate surrounds the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper contributes to the discussion by bringing in concepts and findings from evolutionary economics. It makes three points. First, adopting an evolutionary market process perspective sheds new light on the nature...

In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents' evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. Organizations reach a...

We focus on the relationship of age and diversification patterns of German machine tool manufacturers in the post war era. Based on trade journals we track the entire firm populations' product portfolio development throughout each firm's lifetime. We distinguish between 'minor diversification'...

This paper shows how cognitive human dispositions that take effect at the level of an individual firm's corporate culture have repercussions on an industry's evolution. In our theory, the latter is attributable to evolving corporate cultures coupled with changes in a firm's business environment....

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, ‘creative destruction’ leads to economic development ‘from within’ (macro). It is...