Novelty in adaptation

Evolutionary theories traditionally neglected the issue of novelty and focused primarily on change and adaptation. Nevertheless, novelty is a central construct and a central phenomenon in organizational theories and life. Studies relevant to novelty can be found in research on ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’, ‘invention’, ‘discovery’ or ‘genius’. Such contributions, however, have pictured a subset of the phenomenon, in that they address the few novelties that result in success. Yet most novelties are failures. Asymmetric sampling is probably responsible for our poor understanding of both success and novelty. In this entry, we reposition the attention to novelty as a neutral phenomenon. We provide a tentative definition using well-known dichotomies: relative/absolute, radical/incremental, Lamarckian/Darwinian, directed/undirected, exogenous/endogenous. We conclude by referring to studies on organizational design for novelty.