Abstract
Inspired by Herbert Simon’s notion of nearly decomposable systems, researchers have examined modularity as a powerful approach to manage technological change in product innovation. We articulate this approach as the hierarchy-of-parts architecture and explain how it emphasizes decomposition of a design into loosely coupled parts and subsequent aggregation of these into an industrial product. To realize the scale benefits of modularity, firms successively freeze design specifications before production and therefore only allow limited windows of functionality design and redesign. This makes it difficult to take advantage of the increased speed by which digitized products can be developed and modified. To address this problem, we draw on Christopher Alexander’s notion of design patterns to introduce a complementary approach to manage technological change that is resilient to digital technology. We articulate this approach as the network-of-patterns architecture and explain how it emphasizes generalization of ideas into patterns and subsequent specialization of patterns for different design purposes. In response to the increased digitization of industrial products, we demonstrate the value of complementing hierarchy-of-parts thinking with network-of-patterns thinking through a case study of infotainment architecture at an automaker. As a result, we contribute to the literature on managing products in the digital age: we highlight the properties of digital technology that increase the speed by which digitized products can be redesigned; we offer the notion of architectural frames and propose hierarchy-of-parts and network-of-patterns as frames to support innovation of digitized products; and, we outline an agenda for future research that reconsiders the work of Simon and Alexander as well as their followers to address key challenges in innovating digitized products.
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Notes
We use the term ‘digitized products’ as a short-name for digitized tangible products. We refer to digitized products as assemblages of digital and physical components that are commonly recognized as an end to a customer need. Examples of digitized products are everyday consumer products such as cars and cameras, but also an entire of range industrial equipment including ship cranes and underground mining vehicles (Jonsson, 2010).
It should be emphasized that Simon (1996: 215) noted that ‘how complex or simple a structure is depends critically upon the way in which we describe it.’ In this regard, Simon underlined that complexity is not an invariant aspect of technology but is primarily a matter of identifying and enacting appropriate representations.
We recognize that the hierarchy-of-parts frame presented here represents a general frame from which different variants emerge in the contingency of everyday practices. Our objective is to present an ideal type ‘formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view’ (Weber, 1949: 90). In this regard, the frame represents conceptual constructs that may not appear in reality in its purest form, but represent a manifestation of theorizing through idealization (Lopreato and Alston, 1970; Ohlsson and Lehtinen, 1997).
In addition to modularization in product architecture (design) and modularization in production, Takeishi and Fujimoto (2003) also highlight modularization in inter-firm systems as an additional ‘facet’ of modularization.
It is somewhat ironic that the network-of-patterns frame has had more impact in software engineering than in architecture (Alexander, 1999; Gabriel, 1996; Mehaffy, 2007). The software engineering community’s interest in Alexander’s work has boomed since Gamma et al. (1995) outlined a language consisting of 23 patterns for recurring problems in object-oriented software design.
Alexander et al. (1977) exemplifies a comprehensive pattern language consisting of 253 patterns for how to address city planning, building, and construction problems. The description of each pattern follows the same syntax, including the problem, core of the solution, archetypical example, context of the pattern, empirical background of the pattern, and evidence of its validity.
The term infotainment refers to media providing a combination of information and entertainment. In the automotive industry it includes navigation, telematics, rear-seat entertainment, and similar systems.
MOST also addressed the physical layer of infotainment architecture. It offered a fiber-optical bus network, providing bandwidth far beyond hitherto established solutions. This network interconnected the different components through a generic, non-functional interface in a ring topology. In such a ring topology, components are not nested to hide complexity. Instead, all components are found at the same level, regardless of potential functionality dependences. Seen as a layer in a higher-level hierarchy – for example a car – such a system is flat, having a wide span (Simon, 1962) at that level. This allowed engineers to mount components just about anywhere in a car, as long as it was possible to connect a tiny fiber-optical wire.
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Henfridsson, O., Mathiassen, L. & Svahn, F. Managing technological change in the digital age: the role of architectural frames. J Inf Technol 29, 27–43 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.30