Dominant Design (dominant + design)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Evolution of strategic management: The need for new dominant designs

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT REVIEWS, Issue 2 2005
Pol Herrmann
The development of strategic management is explained from an evolutionary perspective on the basis of cycles of variation, selection and retention. In industry, breakthrough innovations, or technological discontinuities, initiate eras of ferment that end when a generally accepted standard, or dominant design, starts an era of incremental change. In strategic management, the original definition of strategy initiated an era of ferment characterized by a focus on the environment. The attention to the environment of firms and the integration with other areas of inquiry reached a point of maturity with development of a widely accepted model for analyzing industry and with the definition of generic strategies. The resource-based view of the firm created a new era of ferment by affirming that the main sources of sustainable competitive advantages reside in the development and use of valuable resources. A new period, marked by swift advances in technology and increasingly blurred boundaries among industries, markets and competitors as well as diverse and more complex sources of competitive advantages, imposes on scholars and practitioners an imperative need to conceive new dominant designs. This paper illustrates the evolution toward new directions and challenges of creating new dominant paradigms in strategic management that revolve around the concepts of knowledge, learning, and innovation. [source]


Standardization of Network Technologies: Market Processes or the Result of Inter-Firm Co-operation?

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 4 2001
Bertrand Quélin
As recent studies on the evolution of a technology indicate, the role of a standard, or dominant design, is highly significant in a number of contemporary industries such as computer, telecommunications and consumer electronics. Following Katz' and Shapiro's pioneering works (1985), our paper rationally evaluates the concepts and results developed over the past ten years in this field. It is grounded on a typology of two types of models: the first is based on users' anticipatory behaviour, and the second, on the collaborative behaviour of existing firms. The article initially discusses the specificity of network technologies, then analyses market standardisation models, and finally, studies the different actors models. Our conclusion builds upon existing works in network technologies. We next propose a research agenda [source]


Interfirm Innovation under Uncertainty: Empirical Evidence for Strategic Knowledge Partitioning,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2008
Jaegul Lee
This paper analyzes how uncertainty and life-cycle effects condition the knowledge boundary between assemblers and suppliers in interfirm product development. Patents associated with automotive emission control technologies for both assemblers and suppliers are categorized as architectural or component innovations, and technology-forcing regulations imposed by the government on the auto industry from 1970 to 1998 are used to define periods of high and low uncertainty. Results confirm that suppliers dominate component innovation whereas assemblers lead on architectural innovation. More importantly, when facing uncertainty firms adjust their knowledge boundary by increasing the knowledge overlap with their supply-chain collaborators. Suppliers clearly expand their knowledge base relatively more into architectural knowledge during such periods. But assemblers' greater emphasis on component innovation in periods of greater uncertainty is only true as a relative deviation from an overall trend toward increasing component innovation over time. This trend results from an observed life-cycle effect, whereby architectural innovation dominates before the emergence of a dominant design, with component innovation taking the lead afterward. Thus, for assemblers life-cycle effects may dominate over task uncertainty in determining relative effort in component versus architectural innovation. This work extends research on strategic interfirm knowledge partitioning as well as on the information-processing view of product development. First, it provides a large-scale empirical justification for the claim that firms' knowledge boundaries need to extend beyond their task boundaries. Further, it implies that overlaps in knowledge domains between an assembler and suppliers are particularly important for projects involving new technologies. Second, it offers a dynamic view of knowledge partitioning, showing how architectural knowledge prevails in the early phase of the product life cycle whereas component knowledge dominates the later stages. Yet the importance of life-cycle effects versus task uncertainty in conditioning knowledge boundaries is different for assemblers and suppliers, with the former dominating for assemblers and the latter more influential for suppliers. Finally, it supports the idea that architectural and component knowledge are critical elements in the alignment of cognitive frameworks between assemblers and suppliers and thus are key for information-exchange effectiveness and resolution of task uncertainties in interfirm innovation. [source]


Evolution of strategic management: The need for new dominant designs

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT REVIEWS, Issue 2 2005
Pol Herrmann
The development of strategic management is explained from an evolutionary perspective on the basis of cycles of variation, selection and retention. In industry, breakthrough innovations, or technological discontinuities, initiate eras of ferment that end when a generally accepted standard, or dominant design, starts an era of incremental change. In strategic management, the original definition of strategy initiated an era of ferment characterized by a focus on the environment. The attention to the environment of firms and the integration with other areas of inquiry reached a point of maturity with development of a widely accepted model for analyzing industry and with the definition of generic strategies. The resource-based view of the firm created a new era of ferment by affirming that the main sources of sustainable competitive advantages reside in the development and use of valuable resources. A new period, marked by swift advances in technology and increasingly blurred boundaries among industries, markets and competitors as well as diverse and more complex sources of competitive advantages, imposes on scholars and practitioners an imperative need to conceive new dominant designs. This paper illustrates the evolution toward new directions and challenges of creating new dominant paradigms in strategic management that revolve around the concepts of knowledge, learning, and innovation. [source]