What is Fitness Landscapes

This chapter presents, extends, and integrates a complexity science perspective and applies this to the firm's IT-enabled dynamic capabilities (ITDCs). By doing so, this chapter leverages statistical survey data and uses them as parameters for a simulation using Kauffman's NK-model. This NK-model creates stochastically generated fitness landscapes that are parameterized using a finite number of ‘N' elements, or capabilities, and ‘K' complex interactions between those capabilities, and studies the performance (fitness) of systems. We simulate a firm's effort to adaptively explore and walk through a fitness landscape of possible strategies of inter-related capabilities to reach toward higher levels of fitness of ITDCs. Also, our fitness landscape model provides realistic scenarios with a nexus of possible business strategies that can be employed considering a firm's current status, interdependency, and alignment among its capabilities. Our work suggests that firms achieve the highest fitness values when the interdependency among the individual capabilities is relatively small.