Barnett & Hansen's founding 1996 Red Queen organizational paper tested the theory on Illinois commercial banks, not computer manufacturers

The paper that introduced William P. Barnett's formal Red Queen model into organizational theory — William P. Barnett & Morten T. Hansen, "The Red Queen in Organizational Evolution," Strategic Management Journal 17(S1):139–157 (1996) — was empirically tested on commercial banking, not on computer manufacturing. The authors' own abstract, hosted on the Stanford GSB faculty publication page, states: "Estimates of organizational failure rates reveal a Red Queen among Illinois banks, and support our predictions." The model predicts "maladaptive consequences when organizations face many, varied cohorts of rivals," estimated through "ecological models of competition."

This matters for how the vault reads the "two central case industries" framing in claim-barnett-applied-red-queen-to-organizational-competition. Barnett's empirical demonstration of Red Queen dynamics was built up industry by industry, paper by paper: the 1996 founding test used Illinois banks, while the computer-manufacturing evidence comes from later, separately co-authored work (claim-barnett-mckendrick-2004-tested-red-queen-on-disk-drive-makers; claim-barnett-book-text-asserts-disk-drive-industry-drives-up-failure-rates). The book's bundling of computer manufacturing and commercial banking as one pair of "case industries" therefore synthesizes findings from at least two distinct empirical projects on two different datasets, not a single study spanning both.

The core mechanism — rivals driving up each other's failure rates as the signature of Red Queen competition — is the same across both settings and mirrors the biological original (claim-red-queen-hypothesis-names-running-to-stay-in-place). What changes is the industry the hazard model is fit to. See entity-william-barnett.