Unpacking the Black Box of Modularity: technologies, products, organizations

This paper explores the issues of knowledge and organizational co-ordination that stem from the adoption of modular product architectures. Modularity is a common characteristic of the products we have studied: aircraft engines and chemical plants. In contrast to much current research on product and organizational design, we argue that knowledge and organizational co-ordination cannot be achieved by relying only on automatic mechanisms enabled by the modular product architectures. Rather, the achievement of knowledge and organizational co-ordination demands interactive management of the actors and activities involved. This co-ordination role is played by companies which we define as ‘systems integrators’. We contend that achieving knowledge co-ordination demands that systems integrators be able to span capabilities over a range of technological fields that is wider than the range of activities that they actually perform in house.