Of fruit flies, toads, and other hopeful monsters: thoughts on Levinthal’s Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation

Dan Levinthal’s exciting new book, Evolutionary Processes and Organizational Adaptation, fundamentally expands our understanding of how executives enable organizational adaptation, highlighting their role in creating an artificial selection environment within the organization to accelerate learning. In this short essay, I review some key aspects of Levinthal’s arguments, especially his reconceptualization of exploration as the opening up of new performance dimensions. I then highlight some implications of his ideas for research on entrepreneurship, nonmarket strategy, and stakeholder theory that warrant further development.