Modularity and Innovation in Complex Systems

By Sendil K. Ethiraj, Daniel A. Levinthal. Management Sciences, 2002

858 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c385ea19b7bd527cf4d5830d4d3cb229e9d4dfc8

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In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Organizational Structure, Information Processing, and Decision-Making: A Retrospective and Road Map for Research (2020, background): “For example, Ethiraj and Levinthal (2004) modeled the outcomes ofmanagers under- and overmodularizing their organizational designs relative to the actual structure.”
The performance impact of supply chain agility and supply chain adaptability: the moderating effect of product complexity (2015, background): “Modular designs are considered a useful means for managing product complexity (Ethiraj and Levinthal 2004).”
Can we trust Big Data? Applying philosophy of science to software (2016, background): “It was later adopted by emerging ﬁelds in the study of complex systems (Ethiraj and Levinthal, 2004) and business related issues concerning organizational structures and product design (Brusoni and Prencipe, 2001).”
Incomplete by Design and Designing for Incompleteness (2008, background): “Modularity scholars have suggested that partial partitioning can be a problem (Ethiraj and Levinthal 2004).”
Where do capabilities come from and how do they matter? A study in the software services industry (2005, neutral): “The notion of capabilities can be traced back to Penrose (1959) and Andrews (1971), among others (see also Selznick, 1957).”
Integrating Distributed Work: Comparing Task Design, Communication and Tacit Coordination Mechanisms (2011, background): “…or minimally coupled (Simon, 1962), as well as possible opportunity costs arising from the fact that some interdependence is probably ignored when an interface is designed – organizational architects are unlikely to infallibly discover perfect loci for decoupling (Ethiraj and Levinthal, 2004).”
Understanding why firms should invest in sustainable supply chains: a complexity approach (2012, background): “Interdependence (positive or negative) and intensity (interaction strength) alternate with time, as well as element importance (Ethiraj and Levinthal 2004).”
Two Faces of Search: Alternative Generation and Alternative Evaluation (2007, background): “These properties are reflected in the screening functions represented in Figure 1.”
Patterned Interactions in Complex Systems: Implications for Exploration (2007, methodology): “We embed such patterns into an NK simulation model and obtain dramatic results: holding fixed the total number of interactions among decisions, a shift in the pattern of interaction can alter the number of local optima by more than an order of magnitude.”
Allocation of Inventive Effort in Complex Product Systems (2007, neutral): “Modularity is a general set of design principles for managing the complexity of such large-scale product systems.”
Organizational structure as a determinant of performance: Evidence from mutual funds (2012, background): “…within the three fundamental themes of organization design: (1) organizational search or alternative generation (e.g., Rivkin and Siggelkow, 2003; Ethiraj and Levinthal, 2004); (2) alternative evaluation (e.g., Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000; Knudsen and Levinthal, 2007); and (3) execution or…”
Complementarities Between Organizational IT Architecture and Governance Structure (2010, background): “Information Systems Research, Articles in Advance, pp. 1–17, © 2009 INFORMS 3 subsystems of a modular system are significantly weaker than those within them (Ethiraj and Levinthal 2004).”
Toward a Systematic Framework for Research on Dominant Designs, Technological Innovations, and Industrial Change (2006, positive): “We also incorporate more systematically into dominant design theory the idea of modularity in product architectures (Langlois and Robertson, 1992; Ulrich, 1995; Baldwin and Clark, 1997, 2000; Ethiraj and Levinthal, 2004).”
Modularity: Implications for Imitation, Innovation, and Sustained Advantage (2006, background): “Limiting interdependence between components too extensively eliminates opportunities to improve performance and may reduce the usefulness of a firm’s innovations (Ethiraj & Levinthal, 2004; Fleming & Sorenson, 2001).”
The Role of Interdependence in the Micro-Foundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence (2020, background): “…as exogenously given, the matrix representation’s rows and columns (i.e., subtasks) can be re-arranged to generate modules that exhibit high within-module interdependence but little across-module interdependence (e.g., Baldwin, MacCormack, & Rusnak, 2014; Ethiraj & Levinthal, 2004).”