ABSTRACT
This essay indirectly aims to question the main characteristics of the ‘evolutionary’ or so-called ‘Schumpeterian’ model of innovation and competition (see Nelson and Winter’s 1982 seminal book). According to this model, innovators (or innovating firms) form a subset of entrepreneurs (or firms) and are confronted with potential innovations while evolving in a context of incomplete information. Although they are dealing with uncertainty yet facing the existence of their own cognitive limits, innovators display ‘rational’ economic behaviour insofar as they are able to do their best, either through traditional profit maximizing, or through Simonian satisficing. Competition is therefore described as a process of selection amongst the set of entrepreneurs which strongly depends on their respective abilities to create provisional monopolies through innovation and, consequently, on their market performances. Markets do indeed provide the means to compare the different ‘rational’ behaviours of the different agents (or firms). Agents (or firms) that obtain the lowest profitability are eliminated or, at least, are compelled to discard their actual routines. Agents (or firms) that obtain the highest profitability are strengthened and they maintain their new products, techniques, markets or forms of organization to the economy. At the level of the economic system, a global process of ‘creative destruction’ is then generated. It implies an organic transformation of the economic system, and this transformation is equated or associated with biological evolution.
