Saul Mendoza-Palacios (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas),Onesimo Hernandez-Lerma (Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN)
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This Element examines the historical emergence of evolutionary economics, its development into a strong research theme after 1980, and how it has hosted a diverse set of approaches. Its focus on complexity, economic dynamics and bounded rationality is underlined. Its core ideas are compared with those of mainstream economics. But while evolutionary economics has inspired research in a number of areas in business studies and social science, these have become specialized and fragmented. Evolutionary economics lacks a sufficiently-developed core theory that might promote greater conversation across these fields. A possible unifying framework is generalized Darwinism. Stronger links could also be made with other areas of evolutionary research, such as with evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology. As evolutionary economics has migrated from departments of economics to business schools, institutes of innovation studies and elsewhere, it also needs to address the problem of its
Coevolution in economic systems plays a key role in the dynamics of contemporary societies. Coevolution operates when, considering several evolving realms within a socioeconomic system, these realms mutually shape their respective innovation, replication and/or selection processes. The processes that emerge from coevolution should be analyzed as being globally codetermined in dynamic terms. The notion of coevolution appears in the literature on modern innovation economics since the neo-Schumpeterian inception four decades ago. In this Element, these antecedents are drawn on to formally clarify and develop how the coevolution notion can expand the analytical and methodological scope of evolutionary economics, allowing for further unification and advance of evolutionary subfields.
