Entrepreneurship & Types of Selection
Hopefully you’ve already read the Definition of a Nascent Entrepreneur, the Four Abiding Elements of Entrepreneurs, the article on Entrepreneurs and their R&K Strategies, Entrepreneurs & the Environment and Entrepreneurs & Gaining Legitimacy. At this point it’s time to look at the pressures on a business caused through the types of selection.
The Types of Selection
There are four types of selection that occur and that you need to be aware about… because understanding why your business or a competitors business succeeds or fails in these terms gives you the power to make judgment calls. The questions are when to best enter a market and, if you’re entering, how best to respond to the types of selection apparent in the market. When you think about it, there is an interrelationship between selection and adaptation when anything exists in both time and space.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that selection only occurs above the level of heritable fitness.
Natural Selection
This is what you would normally think of as evolutionary selection. However it comes in three varieties – directional selection, disruptive selection and stabilising selection.
Directional selection is where there is a movement of the mean of a population along some dimension. An example, if we looked at language, would be trendy words and phrases that put pressure on the English language. If we looked at the local pizza industry it would be the building of the Tasmanian Casino in the 1970s which led to later opening hours on the streets of Hobart and the increase in drunk people looking for fast food late at night.
Disruptive selection involves the removal of some firms from the population’s extreme interior. In language this involves words that are removed or which lose their meaning. Similarly, in the local pizza industry if you could not provide delivery or you didn’t have the correct conveyor to speed up your cooking process you would have been selected against. The Atom Bomb was a disruptive selection in world military dominance.
Stabilising selection involves the outer-lying traits in a population being selected against, for example selecting for strong cash flows. In language this is the process of entering new words into the Oxford Dictionary. In the local pizza industry this meant that cheap pizza makers survived and gourmet pizza makers survived, too – but those in the middle were selected against because they had weaker cash flows.
Operant Selection
This is often called Internal Selection and it involves the deliberate retention of behaviours that (by chance, experimentation or intentionally) prove beneficial. In language this is the pressure of dialect, colloquialism and jargon. In the local pizza industry this was where pizza makers saw others succeed through certain practices and they adopted the same practices.
Kin Selection
This is where intentional or unintentional behaviours by one actor to another occur where it is beneficial to the recipient but may be harmful to the actor. In language kin selection involves words like sorry and surrender. In the local pizza industry it involved the initial camaraderie phase with information sharing and helping each other to improve their business processes. Kin selection in military terms involved the US supplying Afghan rebels with anti-aircraft missiles to fight the Soviet Army and which were then turned against US planes in the post 9/11 invasion.
Artificial Selection
This is where we intervene and select… in language it’s where we invent words out of thin air. But it’s important to understand that some selection is based on this completely artificial force and accept that we may or may not be artificially selected against – tomorrow a law may come out that bans the type of work you provide, for example. That would be the government artificially selecting against your business model.
Understanding the Forces of Selection
While many who read this may think we’ve just discussed some meaningless drivel about evolution they previously understood… I’d like you to consider the importance of understanding your industry and the players within it… over time… and space… in the context of these terms. Because if you don’t understand what’s happening and can’t see where it’s going then it makes competing all the more difficult.
This is all just about providing a frame of reference, a vocabulary, to discuss how businesses – your business – operates. Nothing more.
The Entrepreneurship 101 Series
Other installments in this short series on the definition and challenges of entrepreneurship are below. There is a special thankyou to Dr Colin Jones from the University of Tasmania for providing the underlying theoretical component that makes up the bulk of this series.
- Definition of a Nascent Entrepreneur
- Four Abiding Elements of Entrepreneurs
- Entrepreneurs and their R & K Strategies
- Entrepreneurs & the Environment
- Entrepreneurs & Gaining Legitimacy
- Entrepreneurship & Types of Selection
- Entrepreneurs & Occurrences of Environment
- Pulling Entrepreneurship Theory Together
