Learning to Evolve: Developing a practice-based evolutionary language of entrepreneurial learning

Over the past few decades an emerging group of social scientists have been adopting evolutionary approaches to study socio-cultural change. Some have taken this approach to reconceptualise the small business’ struggle for survival as an evolutionary process in which the entrepreneur must ‘learn to evolve’. In this chapter, this practice-based evolutionary language is explored. Entrepreneurial learning is thus reinterpreted as the co-evolution of components of knowledge through the mechanisms of variation-selection-retention. It is argued that if knowledge co-evolves, and more importantly if entrepreneurs become aware of this evolution, then they can learn to adapt, and so influence the wider evolutionary process within the firm and beyond.