SME'S SUPPORT AND REGIONAL POLICY IN EU - THE NORTE-LITORAL PORTUGUESE EXPERIENCE



The firm’s orientation is strongly conditioned by the dominating cultural framework and
by their leaders’ habits and by the established routines, which favours the adoption of an
ongoing and gradual change;

The selection processes, either in the firm or in the market, do hardly conduce to optimal
solutions even in the long run.

Although it has allowed to deepen analytically, the metaphor of the “natural selection” has
brought in to the evolutionist authors several difficulties, making them to distance themselves
in some aspects of the original naturalistic inspiration (De Bresson, 1987; Paulré, 1997). In
light of this, we deem useful and important to point out two topics:

Entrepreneurial innovations subjected to selection are not ‘a result’ of environment
pressure. They emerge from firm’s interactions with its environment, thereby being
frequently based upon projects of competence acquisition (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990);

The studies on the ‘path dependency’ phenomena and on the ‘lock-in’ effects (Arthur,
1989) have consolidated the idea that selection of technologies is strongly subjected to
history, which made evolutionist thought to give little attention to radical change
processes.

Attempting to solve such problems, new approaches were developed with the useful
contribution of the cognitive sciences (Dodgson, 1993). Such opening from economics to life
sciences allows for an understanding of the firm through the use of concepts that are more
consistent with the behaviour displayed by the actors of the firm. On the other hand, it
assimilates the crucial contributions of the contemporaneous evolutionist thought and,
simultaneously, it also overcomes the inherent limitations to the neo-darwinist inspiration (cf.
Allen, 1988:99; Conti, 1995:79).

1.1.2 The Firm as self-organising system

The convergence of models that conduct research in different fields of science (Corning,
1995) permitted to consolidate a new paradigm to interpret the complex systems’ functioning.
In fact,
far from the equilibrium, these systems display non-linear behaviours that creates
conditions for the emergence of a new organisation, or for a qualitative change within the
pre-existing organisation.



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