334 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 6 / 2015 To conclude, there are important limitations preventing defence from evolving towards new capabilities. This leads us to analyse some practical implications, which we will do in the next section. 7. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS The theory of evolutionary economics places emphasis on the role of knowledge in society’s capacity to adapt to context and in the search for efficient solutions. Some ideas are tested and are reliable. Others are tested and are rejected and regenerated with new conjectures which frequently constitute variations of the rejected ideas. The final result of this iterative process is greater knowledge, which contributes towards procuring better and more refined solutions. The main consequence arising from this is that actions aimed at reinforcing mechanisms that generate variety, selection and replication should be promoted. This is a way of boosting knowledge, the basic pillar for the evolution of capabilities towards greater efficiency. This makes it necessary to have an effective institutional structure. By this we mean one that is capable of generating variety and of efficiently sifting through innovations, accepting and disseminating the good ones and rejecting the bad ones; in other words, hosting an environment favourable to innovation and entrepreneurship. In this sense, we see how some nations have better strategies than others based on the important differences in capabilities we observe in practice. Variety can be boosted with the support of search and learning activities that materialise in research, development and innovation projects, such as the funding of research centres and private initiatives in these areas. In small projects, where the cost of funding the generation of variety is reduced, a decentralised competition of ideas between firms could be more appropriate. This is more difficult in large-scale projects, where the provision of the operational, technical and industrial knowledge of several nations allows for more focused exploration and the analysis of more alternatives thanks to the resources accumulated in a multinational programme. For these cases, carrying out this activity in the framework of joint European armed forces and a European defence market could be more advantageous. A European vision, in spite of the existing difficulties hampering its realisation, could clearly favour the procurement of better capabilities and a more efficient defence. Another alternative is to imitate the solutions of other nations and industries, which are clear leaders in defence, by making the appropriate adaptations with the double objective of reducing the efforts involved in the search process and obtaining a better product, an option frequently adopted by the Europeans in relation to US developments. The selection mechanism requires a special design in order to avoid two errors. The first is the lack of success as a result of the search in barren areas. The second is the http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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