
The Behavioral Strategy Interest Group presents…
A Masterclass on Adaptation with Daniel Levinthal
We often speak of organizations as adapting to their environment; however, a central facet of the “environment” for many organizational actors is the organization itself. The metrics by which individuals and initiatives within the organization are evaluated form an “artificial” selection environment within the organization. The potential loose coupling between such an artificial selection environment and a firm’s immediate competitive environment of the market both creates the space for strategic initiatives — a projection of future benefits to the organization that would not be reflected in immediate payoffs to the organization — and for potential pathologies of misalignment with the organization’s competitive context. While recent years have brought important attention to the role of experimentation and the associated learning that may stem from such efforts, we have tended to under-attend to the associated challenges of interpretation. The artificial selection environment of the organization is an important facet of that interpretative process. Further, an important dynamic of the organization is the possible adaptive dynamics of the selection criteria itself. These dynamics may be animated both by feedback mechanisms from the market and processes of population level learning and by contestation, possibly power-based contestation, within the organization.
Daniel Levinthal is the Reginald H. Jones Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Levinthal has published extensively on questions of organizational adaptation and industry evolution, particularly in the context of technological change with 70 articles and book chapters that have received over 20,000 citations. He is a Fellow of both the Strategic Management Society, the Academy of Management, and the Academy of International Business.
This webinar is FREE for SMS members, and $19 for non-members.