ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades an emerging group of social scientists have been adopting evolutionary approaches to study socio-cultural change. Some have taken this approach to reconceptualise the small business's struggle for survival, as the entrepreneur ‘learns to evolve’. In this chapter, this practice-based evolutionary language is explored. Entrepreneurial learning is thus reinterpreted as the co-evolution of components of knowledge through the mechanisms of variation–selection–retention. It is argued that if knowledge co-evolves, and more importantly if entrepreneurs become aware of this evolution, they can learn to adapt and so influence the wider evolutionary process within the firm and beyond.
