Samenvatting

This study deals with the ability of management to successfully innovate their organizations by means of adaptation. Two main theories, organizational ecology (OE) and contingency theory (CT) have used the concept of organizational form to debate if inertia (OE) or adaptation (CT) is more the order of the day. This study wants to make a contribution towards this debate by asking to what extent managers of existing firms can (or cannot) support innovation by means of organizational adaptation. We use evolutionary economics to deal with this question because on the one hand this field has arguments for both organizational change and stability and other hand it enable us to extend the evolutionary model with the concept organizational form.
The results show that organizational innovation is not only a product of selection on population level. A case study of the automobile industry demonstrates that new subpopulations are created by changing incumbents and not only by new entrants.