A theory of the cultural evolution of the firm: the intra-organizational ecology of memes

The final source of variation in firms is meme recombination--the way in which new phenotypic effects are created from existing memes. There are two steps involved in this process: the movement of memes around the firm to bring them into a position where they can be combined; and then the recombination itself. The social networks of the firm are an important determinant of the first step. There are many theories (for example, Burt 1992; Ibarra and Andrews 1993; Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998; Thornton 1999) about how the shape of these networks influences the likelihood of particular ideas coming together in a firm. For example, in his review of social capital research, Burt (2000) argues that actors who span structural holes (that is, maintain non-redundant contacts) are more likely to recognize novel ideas, discern their value, and also possibly direct others (and their memes) into contact. Regarding the second step (the actual recombining), it is probably well established by now that creative leaps are, in essence, the connection of two or more disparate ideas or concepts within the mind of an individual (Simon 1991; Amabile 1996). The French mathematician Henri Poincare recognized this point long ago, for example, when reflecting on how the finest ideas were generated in the sciences:

'They are those which reveal to us unsuspected kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another. Amongst chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart.' (Poincare 1908)

Feldman (2000) notes that it is not necessary for ideas to migrate through social networks in order for novel combinations to emerge. Changes in metamemes, in other words, 'new rules or new ways of putting elements together' (Feldman 2000: 624), can lead to purely endogenous recombinations within a single mind. In either case, the intuition that creativity is fundamentally about recombining ideas has gained currency among cognitive scientists, and is now termed 'conceptual integration' or blending and described as a fundamental cognitive process in the generation of novel insights (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). Overall, this notion of variation through recombination is highly compatible with the popular Schumpeterian (1934) view of innovation, which 'consists to a substantial extent of a recombination of conceptual and physical materials that were previously in existence' (Nelson and Winter 1982: 30; see also March and Levitt 1988; Hargadon and Sutton 1997; Galunic and Rodan 1998).

Retention

Retention complements variation. If variation is about new memes and new combinations of memes, retention is about the longevity, fidelity, and fecundity of existing memes: how memes survive and are diffused more or less unchanged over time. Retention is a sort of back office of the evolutionary process, an essential operation, but one that is out of the limelight because of the greater attention typically paid in organization theory to invention and novelty. As we saw in the last section, however, retention cannot be taken for granted. Without the consistent retracing over and over of the same steps from memes to their phenotypic expression, there is no evolution (only random change) and the firm would not survive (Aldrich 1979:30-31). In this section, we examine the ways in which the longevity, fidelity and fecundity of memes is achieved in firms.