The Benefits of Radical Inovation in ‘Architectural Innovation'

613 Words2 Pages

This review focuses on the research paper ‘Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms’ (Henderson and Clark, 1990). Radical and incremental innovations have long been the corner stone of which firms base their knowledge of technological innovations. However, the research paper serves to shed light on one of the less evident forms of innovation – Architectural Innovation. Architectural innovations are, as defined by Henderson and Clark, an innovation that change the way in which components of a product are linked together, while leaving the core design concepts untouched (Pg. 1, Para 5). In other words, architectural innovation destroys the usefulness of a firm’s architectural knowledge, but preserves the usefulness of its knowledge about individual product components. The paper argues that the inability of firms to identify and recognise new interactions between components has serious competitive consequences. The argument is exemplified in the photolithographic industry, where one after another, firms lost thei...

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