Path dependence and transients in random and adaptive walks on strategy fitness landscapes

摘要

Over the last decade complexity theory in general, and Kaufmann 's NK fitness landscape model in particular, have been very popular means of promoting evolutionary and prosessualistic approaches to strategic management. However, either in pure conceptual, or in more formal forms, these models assume rather naive, "memoryless" and unrestricted by past choice strategy processes (organisational structure and decision making), i.e. they ignore the internal dynamics of the strategy-formulation system. In this paper, we demonstrate how system dynamics modelling can enrich the NK fitness landscape model so that these drawbacks are overcome, especially with respect to the way the fitness landscape is searched/walked. The resulting modelling framework becomes particularly useful for understanding strategic behaviours and assessing strategic flexibility under the assumption of resource-based competition as it allows the explicit modelling of the dynamics of assets accumulation and the complementarity and substitution effects among strategic decisions and actions towards resource and capability development for achieving higher fitness. We demonstrate our approach in the modelling of operations strategy as an emergent process of distributed decision making for capabilities development.