The problem of designing, coordinating, and managing complex systems has been central to the management and organizations literature. Recent writings have tended to offer modularity as, at least, a partial solution to this design problem. Two unifying themes characterize the extant literature on...

Integrating suppliers into new product development (NPD) projects offers manufacturers the potential for substantial improvements in the new product being designed. However, it also creates significant inter-organizational integration diseconomies that can negatively affect the manufacturing...

In this paper we explain how firms seeking to take advantage of distributed innovation and outsourcing can bridge the tension between value creation and value capture by modifying the modular structure of their technical systems. Specifically, we introduce the concept of “IP modularity”, a...

Durch den Wechsel von Verkäufer- zu Käufermärkten ist es für die meisten Unternehmen erforderlich, eine hohe Varianz individualisierter Produkte anzubieten. Allerdings führt eine hohe Produktvarianz in der Regel zu einer steigenden Komplexität innerhalb des Unternehmens. Ein zentraler...

The question of whether opening a new technology to secondary developers stimulates innovation is central to public policy and firm strategies in many high-tech industries. Yet there is scant systematic evidence on this relationship. This paper analyzes how opening handheld computer platforms to...

This paper studies the impact of modular assembly on supply chain efficiency. In the modular assembly approach, a manufacturer acquires pre-assembled modules from its suppliers, rather than the individual components, as in the traditional assembly approach. We analyze the competitive behavior of...