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Modular
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- October 2011 (Revised July 2012)
- Background Note
Modularity in Design and Manufacturing: Application to Commercial Aircraft
By: Willy Shih and Margaret Pierson
The note discusses the modularization of design, and the modularization of manufacturing in the commercial aerospace industry. It is intended to be taught with the case, "Boeing 737 Industrial Footprint: The Wichita Decision," HBS No. 612-036. View Details
- 23 Sep 2011
- Conference Presentation
Impact of Modularity on Intellectual Property and Value Appropriation
- July 2011 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
Digital Microscopy Is Making Me Crazy!
By: Willy Shih
For Carl Zeiss Microimaging, modular hardware and software enabled customers to tailor Zeiss's broad range of microscopy systems hardware and software to meet a wide range of needs from basic scientific research in the biological and medical sciences to clinical... View Details
- October 2010 (Revised May 2012)
- Background Note
Reverse Engineering, Learning, and Innovation
By: Willy C. Shih
This background reading looks at reverse engineering in the context of piracy and knock-offs in emerging markets like China. It first considers legal aspects of reverse engineering in strong property rights regimes like the United States as a way of unpacking the legal... View Details
- May 2010 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Delta Electronics Hybrid Power Train
By: Willy C. Shih and Jyun-Cheng Wang
Delta Electronics, the world's largest manufacturer of switching power supplies, hoped to enter the market for gasoline-electric hybrid power trains for automobiles by being a major component and subsystem supplier. While most public awareness of hybrid vehicles fell... View Details
- April 2010
- Course Overview Note
Competing through Business Models
This note was prepared to aid instructors in the EC course “Competing through Business Models” (CTBM). Describes the course objectives; the conceptual framework used in the course; some central principles that emerge from this framework; and the modular structure of... View Details
- 1 Aug 2009
- Conference Presentation
Modularity for Value Appropriation - Drawing the Boundaries of Intellectual Property
Keywords: Value
- 1 Jul 2009
- Conference Presentation
Modularity for Value Appropriation - Drawing the Boundaries of Intellectual Property
- May 2009
- Case
Tokyo Electron Ltd.
By: Willy C. Shih and Andrew A. King
Tokyo Electron Ltd. operates in a constrained innovation environment, defined by modular boundaries that are long standing in the industry that it serves, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. While the original motivation for these boundaries was division... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Architecture of Platforms: A Unified View
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The central role of "platform" products and services in mediating the activities of disaggregated "clusters" or "ecosystems" of firms has been widely recognized. But platforms and the systems in which they are embedded are very diverse. In particular, platforms may... View Details
- August 2008
- Case
System on a Chip 2008: Ardentec Corporation
By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien, Chintay Shih and Ting-Chen Chen
Ardentec Corporation is a specialist in "wafer probing," a highly specialized niche sandwiched between the "front-end" and the "back-end" of semiconductor manufacturing. Because the semiconductor industry uses modular processes and has standard containers for the... View Details
- July 2008 (Revised April 2009)
- Background Note
Horizontal Specialization and Modularity in the Semiconductor Industry
By: Willy C. Shih, Chintay Shih and Chen-Fu Chien
Well-codified interfaces have enabled horizontal specialization in the global semiconductor industry. This Technical Note describes the modern integrated circuit value chain, and the motivation for the reuse of blocks of intellectual property in modern IC designs. It... View Details
- June 2008
- Case
System on a Chip 2008: Global Unichip Corp.
By: Willy C. Shih, Chintay Shih, Chen-Fu Chien and Yuan-Chieh Chang
Though much of the semiconductor industry has shifted to a horizontal model, complexity driven by technological evolution is driving a shift in the perceived boundaries in the value chain. Global Unichip sees itself as a "virtual integrated device manufacturer," a... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis
By: Alan D. MacCormack, John Rusnak and Carliss Y. Baldwin
A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that this organization produces. Specifically, products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
Digital Music: From MP3 to Streaming
By: Willy Shih
The emergence of the MP3 file-based music format not only disrupted the market for portable audio players, it also impacted the business models of major record labels. Modularity, and the commoditization spillover enabled by modularity in the personal computer... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised August 2008)
- Case
Quanta Computer and the One Laptop Per Child Initiative
By: Willy Shih, Chintay Shih and Jyun-Chen Wang
When Quanta Computer, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of laptop computers, first joined the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, it faced a challenge trying to balance the cost objectives of a laptop computer targeted at children of the developing world with... View Details
- February 2008
- Article
Where Do Transactions Come From? Modularity, Transactions, and the Boundaries of Firms
This article constructs a theory of the location of transactions and the boundaries of firms in a productive system. It proposes that systems of production can be viewed as networks, in which tasks-cum-agents are the nodes and transfers—of material, energy and... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Competition in Modular Clusters
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details