The dialectics of creative destruction and uncreative construction: A biomimicry-based approach to sustainable innovation in entrepreneurship
Keywords:
Biomimicry, Creative Destruction, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Sustainable Innovation, Uncreative ConstructionAbstract
Entrepreneurial ecosystems face growing social and environmental pressures that reveal a blind spot in innovation research: the dominance of linear, disruption-driven models that underplay how systems adapt through continuity and reuse. Creative destruction has long explained how industries transform through rupture, but its focus on replacement offers only a partial view of how resilient systems evolve. This paper advances the concept of uncreative construction, a continuity-based, nature-inspired innovation logic grounded in biomimicry and systems thinking, that explains how ventures and ecosystems create novelty by replicating, reorganizing, and renewing existing structures rather than replacing them. The study adopts an integrative theoretical approach that synthesizes literature from ecology, biomimicry, sustainable innovation, and entrepreneurship to develop a conceptual framework for continuity-based innovation. It specifies the mechanisms through which uncreative construction operates and examines their implications for entrepreneurial resilience, transition risk,and sustainable scaling. By articulating the dynamic interplay between creative destruction and uncreative construction, the paper derives a set of testable propositions and outlines a structured agenda for empirical research on continuity-based innovation.
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