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...

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...

What makes competitive advantage enduring and prevents its imitation is a central question in strategy research. In this paper, we investigate how and why complexity deters imitation efforts. We argue that design complexity captures the ease of making localized changes without affecting the...

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...

The paper examines the allocation of inventive effort in complex product systems. I argue that complex product systems (e.g., personal computers) are distinguished by functional interaction among several components each guided by a relatively autonomous bundle of technical and economic...