What is the essential idea of coevolution?
Organizations and their environments interact and change each other. Coevolution suggests that all interactions between populations of organizations result from direct and indirect feedback. An organization that stimulates the evolution of another organization is, in turn, itself responsive to that evolution, and the response is predictable. In direct coevolution, two populations evolve in response to each other. In diffuse coevolution, one or more populations evolve in response to several other organizations in a community. In some situations there may be standard evolution as well. Coevolution implies nonlinear feedback among interacting populations. Why is it important? The idea suggests that changes in populations of organizations can have unexpected and non-intuitive effects in other populations of organization via feedback loops, especially in complex situations. Variables become co-dependent on each other. It also implies that one must consider the overall system and effects of
