Modularity has been heralded as an organizational and technical architecture that enhances incremental and modular innovation. Less attention has been paid to the possible implications of modular architectures for imitation. To understand the implications of modular designs for competitive...

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...