This thread appears to be missing references to support the notions that “emergence is commonly used as an explanation in its own right” and “many people think emergence is a useful concept, yet have different definitions of what it is”.
“Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon” is a valid response to Searle-followers—who ask questions about how brains can be intelligent when no neuron is intelligent. AFAIK, the response doesn’t pretend to be a complete theory about how brains work.
In biology, “evolution” is defined as being the process involving changes of the heritable characteristics of a population over time.
Corporations pass all manner of things on to other companies—including resouces, employees, business methods, intellectual property, documents, premises, computer programs, etc. We are not talking about just a few bits of analog information here—often vast quantities of digital resources are involved.
Corporations form a population. Frequencies of instances of the above listed items in that population varies over time.
Therefore the population of corporations evolves—in the spirit of the classical biological sense of the term.