Beinhocker Ch.14 -- Business Plans as the DNA of the Economy
Beinhocker argues that wealth is not money -- it is fit order. Wealth creation requires transformations that are (1) irreversible, (2) entropy-reducing, and (3) fitness-enhancing. Business Plans are the "DNA" of the economy -- they encode strategies for creating fit order by combining three elements: Physical Technology (how to make things), Social Technology (how to organize people), and Strategy (which market to serve). All three must work together -- fitness is multiplicative. A brilliant product with bad organization fails. A well-run company making the wrong thing also fails.
For wealth to be created, business plans must satisfy the Generalized-Replication conditions: they must encode Physical Technologies that transform matter/energy irreversibly, Social Technologies that coordinate humans to reduce entropy (create order), and Strategies that ensure the resulting products/services are fit for human purposes. The economy evolves by differentially selecting among competing business plans -- creative destruction is the mechanism.