Sustainable development as redirected evolution. Insights from innovation studies and ecological humanities

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe and discuss similarities and differences between human evolutions with natural evolution. This is done after a bibliometric study of the use of eight concepts from ecology in the literature on innovation: evolution, eco-system, variation, retention and selection, niche, bio-mimicry, co-evolution, and the helix metaphor for collaborative arrangements between business, government, academia and civil society organisations. We argue that sustainable development should be understood as redirected evolution: getting closer to sustainable development requires a multitude of changes, each of which is subject to quasi-evolutionary processes of variation, selection, retention.