Emergent Intelligence
Evolution through natural selection has served as a compelling metaphor for understanding corporate innovation and technological development. At first glance, the metaphor is simple: companies, like organisms, compete in changing environments, adapt to survive, and are shaped by selective pressures.
But the comparison runs deeper. As we explore the parallels between biological evolution and human-driven innovation, we uncover striking moments where corporate innovation not only mimics nature—it diverges from it entirely. This divergence gives rise to emergent properties that, in some cases, surpass what biological systems have achieved over billions of years. Yet nature, with its head start, offers surprising counterexamples of complexity and emergence, reminding us we’re still students of a much older system.
Let’s explore 6 dimensions of innovation where this unnatural selection unfolds—and where nature has its own lessons to offer.
1. The Intentionality Gap
In business: Unlike the blind process of natural selection, corporate innovation often begins with deliberate foresight. Leaders set goals, allocate resources, and work backward from desired outcomes. This ability to anticipate and plan allows companies to accelerate development and break free from reactive adaptation.
Advantage: Innovation cycles can outpace biology by orders of magnitude.
Risk: Human foresight is fallible—prone to bias, short-termism, and groupthink.
In nature: While evolution lacks intentionality, nature has produced surprising analogs to foresight. Consider the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, which can "solve" mazes to find the most efficient path to food. Despite lacking a nervous system, its decentralized intelligence emerges through iterative adaptation—seemingly anticipating outcomes.
It’s also worth nothing that some researchers have proposed that cells may actively respond to stresses and environmental changes by editing their own genomes (through transposons and CRISPR-like systems). These changes wouldn’t be random and, if true, would show quasi-intentional capacity to adapt.
This suggests that even without conscious direction, systems can exhibit purpose-like behavior through emergent dynamics.
2. Beyond Pure Utility
In business: Human needs stretch far beyond survival. Products and services succeed not just through utility, but through storytelling, identity, and aesthetics.
Smartphones win not only for performance but for design and brand identity.
Fashion thrives on signaling, not just warmth or protection.
Emotional resonance can outweigh rational efficiency.
In nature: Some traits in animals also transcend strict utility. The extravagant tail of a peacock, or the bowerbird’s obsessively decorated nests, are not functionally optimal—but they serve powerful signaling purposes in mate selection. These displays suggest that aesthetics and social perception can shape evolution too. Altruism in Social Insects also transcends utility. In colonies of ants, bees, and termites, sterile workers forgo their own reproduction to serve the queen and the colony. Their behavior, such as defending the nest or foraging for food, benefits the survival and reproduction of the colony, which includes their relatives. This can be explained by kin selection, where individuals enhance the survival of their genes indirectly by helping relatives. However, the extreme self-sacrifice in some cases seems to go beyond a strict calculation of genetic benefit.
Nature, like the market, sometimes favors what’s beautiful or symbolic over what’s purely efficient.
3. Artificial Selection Pressures
In business: Unlike natural ecosystems, the environments where corporate innovation unfolds are man-made—and often distorted:
Regulation acts as a synthetic selector, blocking or incentivizing certain paths.
Capital markets reward short-term growth, often at the expense of long-term resilience.
Network effects can tilt the playing field, making success less about survival fitness and more about early dominance.
In nature: We see a close analogy in domesticated species. Dogs, for instance, were shaped not by wild environments but by artificial selection—our preferences for traits like docility, appearance, or behavior. The modern bulldog, with traits that would be maladaptive in the wild, thrives because humans shaped its "environment."
Just as domestication created breeds optimized for human desires, corporate ecosystems can produce products and organizations optimized for investor expectations rather than end-user value.
4. Self-Directed Evolution
In business and technology: With the rise of AI and self-improving systems, we’ve entered a feedback loop never seen in biology. Algorithms evolve under the selective pressures we define—clicks, engagement, profits—but unlike in nature, these pressures can be changed mid-stream.
Machine learning systems update themselves without external reproduction.
Meta-innovation—improving how we innovate—is now possible.
The locus of evolution moves from external pressures to internal goals.
In nature: While evolution is mostly blind, some organisms have developed a kind of proto-reflexivity. Cephalopods like octopuses exhibit learning, play, and problem-solving, evolving unusually large brains and short lifespans. Their rapid cognitive evolution suggests a path toward accelerated adaptation, though still bounded by biology.
Corporate innovation, by contrast, can reprogram its own fitness criteria—a profound leap into directed evolution.
5. Emergent Properties: The Corporate Innovation Breakthrough
In business: The most profound difference between natural evolution and corporate innovation lies in the ability to foster and harness emergent properties—complex outcomes that arise from simple interactions, but with intentional scaffolding.
Here’s where corporations shine:
Cross-disciplinary teams create ideas no individual could generate alone.
Organizational structures coordinate thousands of contributors toward unified goals.
Technological stacking allows innovations to build upon each other exponentially (think internet → cloud computing → generative AI).
Cultural transmission enables cumulative knowledge, unlike biological inheritance.
In nature: Emergence exists too. Ant colonies exhibit swarm intelligence, solving complex tasks without centralized control. Ecosystems evolve resilient interdependencies. Neurons form consciousness—not through design, but through vast interaction networks. (It’s worth noting that some of the emergence that we’re witnessing in large language models (LLMs) follow similar patters of evolved consciousness as a product of vast interaction networks).
Still, corporate systems are unique in their recursive emergence—the ability to redesign the very process of innovation. Consider the shift from traditional R&D labs to open innovation platforms or agile methodologies. These aren't new products—they're new ways to make new products.
Nature innovates through iteration. Corporations can innovate through redefinition.
6. The Power of Narrative
In business: Perhaps the most distinct human innovation mechanism is narrative. Stories shape strategy, influence markets, and define purpose.
The myth of the “lone genius” drives certain startup cultures.
Political and historical narratives determine which industries receive support.
Internal culture stories shape employee behavior and morale.
In nature: While animals may communicate and even transmit culture (as seen in some primates, dolphins, or birds), they don’t wield abstract narrative in the way humans do. A company can align hundreds of thousands of people through a shared mission—something no natural organism has achieved at that scale. This, truly, makes homo sapiens unique—even from close relatives like Neanderthals. Our ability to think abstractly, and to share abstract constructs, allows us to form larger and larger complexes of cooperation that yield magical emergent behaviors and outcomes. Perhaps this is where the metaphor with nature calls for an asterisk (*):
Narrative, more than genes or strategy, might be the most powerful tool in unnatural selection.
Conclusion
The metaphor of natural selection offers a useful foundation for understanding innovation—but it’s only a starting point. Corporate innovation represents something categorically different: a system that evolves with foresight, emotion, and culture. A system capable of shaping its own selective environment. A system driven by emergence not just as a consequence, but as a goal.
Nature still holds the masterclass in resilience, complexity, and adaptation. But corporate innovation has evolved a new playbook—one that builds on nature’s rules while rewriting them.
In this new era of unnatural selection, the most successful organizations are not those that merely adapt to change—they are those that create change, by designing environments where emergent properties thrive, values guide selection, and stories shape the future.
