Modularity and incremental innovation: the roles of design rules and organizational communication

Gang Zhang () and Ruoyang Gao ()
Additional contact information
Gang Zhang: Zhejiang University
Ruoyang Gao: Zhejiang University

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 2010, vol. 16, issue 2, No 3, 200 pages

Abstract: Abstract As little attention has been paid to the relationship between modularity and near decomposability, extant studies have not unveiled the impact of modularity on incremental innovation completely. We argue that the modular structure is a special case of nearly decomposable structure, in which the interdependencies between modules are specified by design rules, and the degree of modularity is defined by the level of near decomposability and the extent to which intermodule dependencies are specified. The results of our simulation experiments show that in the term of near decomposability, the increase of modularity leads to higher innovation advantage in the short term, but effective communication between modules can help systems with moderate and low modularity gain more innovation benefits in the long term; in the aspect of design rules, modularization may restrict the search space of the incremental innovation within each module, but under some conditions the option value of modularity may offset or even exceed the restriction effect of design rules.

Keywords: Modularity; Complexity; Near decomposability; Incremental innovation; NK model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10588-010-9071-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:comaot:v:16:y:2010:i:2:d:10.1007_s10588-010-9071-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10588

DOI: 10.1007/s10588-010-9071-5

Access Statistics for this article

Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory is currently edited by Terrill Frantz and Kathleen Carley

More articles in Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().