Tackling True Novelty Through Co-Evolutionary Search

Recent work increasingly looks at how organizational actors strategically formulate, identify, and tackle problems. This view emphasizes sequential search, resting on deductive logic, applied to solve well-defined challenges.... [ view full abstract ]

Recent work increasingly looks at how organizational actors strategically formulate, identify, and tackle problems. This view emphasizes sequential search, resting on deductive logic, applied to solve well-defined challenges. This perspective, however, falls short when actors face truly novel challenges that are characterized by uncertainty or ambiguity. To understand how to grapple with these conditions, we propose a co-evolutionary model of search that explicitly theorizes the organizational action that drives linkages between problems and solutions. We illustrate this using examples of the development of new markets for ‘Graphene’ and an ‘EcoCity’ design project by Arup. Our proposed model highlights the utility of abduction for explaining the resolution of truly novel strategic challenges.