• This website serves as a platform on which to post blogs on the evolutionary nature of technological innovation in general, and the evolution of products in particular.

    For the sake of easy navigation the posts have been organised into two categories. The first category ‘Product Evolution’ provides examples of products that undergo evolutionary change to such an extent that, in effect, a new ‘type of product’ starts to emerge. The second group of posts is dubbed ‘Evolutionary Metaphors’. Here I aim to collect posts that discuss examples of similarities between evolution in biology and technology, as published by other authors and/or from private observations.

    See also About for a more extensive introduction.

  • On the Origin

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    “To understand why a product is the way it is today, you need to learn about its evolutionary background.” Meet Huub Ehlhardt…. to interview

    On the Origin

    Introduction to ‘On the Origin of Products’

    Can product development be considered an evolutionary process? Until the late 1980s product development was generally considered to be a ‘linear’ process. The common idea is that the development of products is entirely controlled by inventors and engineers. ‘On the Origin of Products’ by Arthur O. Eger and Huub Ehlhardt aims…

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    Digitalization, Evolution in Action, Product Evolution

    It’s a watch, but not as we know it. The story of Smartwatch Evolution.

    This blog post reveals how the smartwatch is the result of technological evolution, rather than a predetermined long-term plan. Decades of competition between watch manufacturers who developed new functionality provided variation, while consumers applied selective pressure. This shaped the evolutionary path for the smartwatch. As there is no reason to…

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    Evolutionary Metaphors

    Tree of Life

    This post discusses the tree of life metaphor in relation to man-made goods and includes a proposed figure depicting the evolution of man-made goods.   For a long time I have been fascinated by both evolution in biology and innovation in technology. In 2010 this led to the start of…

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    Evolutionary Metaphors

    Rates of Speciation

    This post discusses rates of speciation (the notions of gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium as used) in evolutionary biology and the extent to which change in products can be described as (dis)continuous. Is product innovation a matter of evolution or revolution? Biology One of the perennial controversies in evolutionary biology is the…

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