Manufacturing strategy: understanding the fitness landscape

This theoretical paper presents, extends and integrates a number of systems and evolutionary concepts, to demonstrate their relevance to manufacturing strategy formulation. Specifically it concentrates on fitness landscape theory as an approach for visually mapping the strategic options a manufacturing firm could pursue. It examines how this theory relates to manufacturing competitiveness and strategy and proposes a definition and model of manufacturing fitness. In accordance with fitness landscape theory, a complex systems perspective is adopted to view manufacturing firms. It is argued that manufacturing firms are a specific type of complex system – a complex adaptive system – and that by developing and applying fitness landscape theory it is possible to create models to better understand and visualise how to search and select various combinations of capabilities.