A fitness landscape, also called an adaptive landscape, is a model that comes from biology where it is used to describe the fitness of a creature within a particular environment, the better suited the creature to the environment the higher its fitness and the higher its elevation on the landscape will be. The adaptive landscape is applicable to any complex adaptive system, such as economies, technologies or social institutions, within this more generic model a location on the landscape is a solution to a given problem, the elevation captures how functional that solution is and solutions that are similar in nature are typically placed close to each other.