Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the term autopoiesis in 1973 to describe the process of self-creation seen in biology. Organizational theorists have adopted the term to refer to the process whereby an organization produces itself.

An autopoietic organization is an autonomous and self-maintaining unity which contains component-producing processes. The components interact recursively to generate the same structure that produced them. An autopoietic system operates with no apparent exogenous inputs and outputs. A cell, an organism, and a corporation each provides an example of an autopoietic system.

An economy represents a larger autopoietic system. Acting humans continually reproduce the components of the system bringing about evolutionary processes similar to those found in biology.