Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Sunday, February 02, 2003A recent issue of the journal Complexity includes an interesting critique of the concept of emergence by Peter Corning. [1] In his essay, Corning takes aim at "the claim that emergent effects can only be the result of 'self-organization.'" He asserts,
Living systems and human organizations are largely shaped by "instructions" (functional information) and by cybernetic control processes. They are not, for the most part, self-ordered; they are predominantly organized by processes that are "purposeful" (teleonomic) in nature and that rely on "control information."
Corning goes on to recommend his Synergism Hypothesis, "that synergistic effects of various kinds have played a major causal role in the evolutionary process generally and in the evolution of cooperation and complexity in particular...Another way of putting it is that synergy [2] explains cooperation in nature, not the other way around." Or, as my colleague Laura Black [3] might put it, people collaborate to get their work done, they don't do it because its deemed to be a "good thing" to do.
As I noted earlier this morning, the Plexus Institute has facilitated the creation of a group to discuss how complexity sciences might shed light on the relationship between entrepreneurship and regional economic development. Interestingly, the tone of our inaugural conversation frequently implied that an emergent economy may be predicated upon self-organization, notwithstanding our common belief that entrepreneurship drives economic development. Curious, given that entrepreneurship is, by definition, teleonomic. Nevertheless, by conscious design or intuition, the group decided to focus simultaneously on adjacent levels of the hierarchy of economics: entrepreneurship and regional economic development.
I wonder if Corning might be on to something here. We deem the cooperative behavior that characterizes entrepreneurship as worthy of study because of its desired synergistic effects -- economic growth, job creation, and innovation. Entrepreneurship is different from economy, but one can't understand the former without consideration of the latter.
[1] "The Re-emergence of 'Emergence': A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory," Complexity, Vol. 7, No. 6, pps 18-30.
[2] In the prologue to his upcoming book, Nature's Magic, Corning offers the following definition of synergy: "Very broadly, the term refers to the combined, or cooperative effects produced by the relationships among various forces, particles, elements, parts or individuals in a given context -- effects that are not otherwise possible. The term is derived from the Greek word synergos, meaning to 'work together' or, literally, to 'co-operate.' Synergy is often associated with the cliche, 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' (which dates back to Aristotle, in The Metaphysics), but this is actually a rather narrow and even misleading characterization. In fact, synergy comes in many different forms; sometimes wholes are not greater than the sume of their parts, just different."
[3] Laura did her Ph.D. work at MIT's Sloan School on collaboration across boundaries. She has noted, "[People] collaborate because they want to accomplish what is asked of them, and a single domain of knowledge is simply insufficient to do what need be done."
Last Friday, I participated in a conference call to organize a new Plexus Institute learning network to focus on how thinking about complexity, social networks, and entrepreneurship can best be applied to regional economic development. For more information contact Curt Lindberg at Plexus.