Abstract
The NK landscape methodology has been used by much research in strategy and organizations, and the concept of “landscape” has become a popular business idea. Despite such popularity, exactly what NK landscapes are and how they work is typically obscure to all but a small specialist audience. This technical note clarifies the NK landscape methodology by explaining how an NK landscape is computed. This note also discusses ways in which NK landscapes are represented and used in research. The aim of this note is enabling more researchers to engage more deeply with the work that relies on the landscape concept.
Highlights
NK landscapes are commonly mentioned in the strategy and organizations literatures
Every author of an NK paper hopes that its readers will already understand NK landscapes at the necessary level, while in reality very few do
The only who can engage at a deep level with an NK paper are those that have developed their own NK models
Summary
NK landscapes are commonly mentioned in the strategy and organizations literatures. over 70 published management papers have developed NK models (see the excellent survey by Baumann et al 2018) and many articles and books use the idea of “landscape” to talk about phenomena such as search, exploration, imitation, competition, fit, and organization design (the “landscape” idea has even made it to the cover of an MBA strategy textbook; see Ghemawat 2010).Despite this popularity, there is much misunderstanding regarding NK landscapes and how they operate. All the results in an NK paper stem from the interaction between the landscape and the search process (in this way, NK models are an embodiment of “Simon’s scissors” principle; Simon 1990).
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