Emergent Constraints in Technological Change: The Formation of Exemplar Technologies and their Effect on the Direction of Future Search

This work suggests that population-level selection of artefact designs produced by firms facing an ill-structured design problem favours the formation of a dominant design with a set of 'high pleiotropy' elements, affecting many product functions. Selective expansion of a technological artefact's active 'design space' may embed a negative heuristic within the design, effectively 'locking-in' earlier design choices. In the absence of sufficient variety-generating mechanisms, competition will result in a dominant design within an industry. This research describes how selection at the population level may interact with the local search routines of firms to produce a dominant design embodying 'frozen' dimensions. Such a design may be seen to form part of a technological paradigm. The investigation nests Koen Frenken's existing model of technological paradigms within an evolutionary population-based model. Entropy statistics indicate several exploratory stages that emerge endogenously via interaction of selection at the firm and population levels