When Open Architecture Beats Closed: The Entrepreneurial Use of Architectural Knowledge

Carliss Y. Baldwin ()
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Carliss Y. Baldwin: Harvard Business School, Finance Unit

No 10-063, Harvard Business School Working Papers from Harvard Business School

Abstract: This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying "bottlenecks" in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture that isolates the bottlenecks in modules and allows others to connect to the system at key interfaces. An entrepreneurial firm with limited financial resources can then focus on supplying superior bottleneck modules, and while outsourcing and allowing complementors to supply non-bottleneck components. I show that a firm pursuing this strategy will have a higher return on invested capital (ROIC) than competitors with a less modular, closed architecture. Over time, the more open firm can drive the ROIC of competitors below their cost of capital, causing them to shrink and possibly exit the market. The strategy was used by Sun Microsystems in the 1980s and Dell Computer in the 1990s.

Keywords: architecture; innovation; knowledge; modularity; dynamics; competition; industry evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 L22 L23 M11 O31 O34 P13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2010-02, Revised 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cse, nep-ent, nep-knm and nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hbs:wpaper:10-063

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