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This chapter describes technological innovation, developmental trajectories, and modes of social organization. It addresses the technological inventions and their order and mode of development as well as the possible role of the individual in the differential occurrences of inventions. It analyzes the mechanisms underlying innovation and fixation processes. It suggests that technological evolution is made up of both continuous and discontinuous innovations. This chapter shows that in farmer-pastoralist cultures, when length of learning times imposed restrictions, new technical tasks developed in closed systems instead of open systems, thereby directly contributing to societies' growing complexity.

Evolutionary processes combine many features of complex systems: they are algorithmic; states co-evolve with interactions; they show power law statistics; they are selforganized critical; and they are driven non-equilibrium systems. Evolution is a dynamical process that changes the composition of large sets of interconnected elements, entities, or species over time. The essence of evolutionary processes is that, through the interaction of existing entities with each other and with their environment, they give rise to an open-ended process of creation and destruction of new entities. Evolutionary processes are critical, co-evolutionary, and combinatorial, meaning that thew entities are created from combinations of existing ones. We review the concepts of the replicator equation, fitness landscapes, cascading events, the adjacent possible. We review several classical quantitative approaches to evolutionary dynamics such as the NK model and the Bak–Snappen model. We propose a general and universal framework for evolutionary dynamics that is critical, co-evolutionary, and combinatorial.

The chapter reviews ideas that have been developed to describe the emergence and change of structures in three fields: Economics, Management, and Design of Technologies. The chapter focuses on one empirical setting, the economy, and more specifically how firms, industries, and technologies change over time. Today’s industrialized economies are very different from the economies before the industrial revolution. The chapter presents key theoretical ideas from evolutionary economics, management, and technology that try to explain why and how economy has been so dramatically transformed over the past 400 years.