Architectural innovation

Henderson, R. M., & Clark, K. B. (1990). Architectural innovation: The reconfiguration of existing product technologies and the failure of established firms. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(1), 9-30.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1990

Volume

35

Issue

1

Pages

9-30

DOI

10.2307/2393549

DOI registrant

JSTOR

Link

https://doi.org/10.2307/2393549

Cited from

computer_science, engineering_design, organizational_management, synthesized, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Absorptive Capacity

  • This sourceDefines architectural innovation (reconfiguring component linkages while leaving components largely unchanged) and shows why it disproportionately harms incumbents.

• Adaptive Capacity
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Arbitrage (Generalized)
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Design for Lifecycle Adaptability
  • A common failure is discovering that the system's anticipated evolution path was wrong, and the adaptability investments don't help with the actual changes needed

    This sourceShows that innovations changing a product's architecture (rather than its components) destroy incumbents' architectural knowledge and catch established firms unprepared.

    Supported in partVerified against the work's full text

    Henderson and Clark show established firms misjudge the kind of change that arrives, invest on the wrong reading, and learn it only after failures; this is about firms, not adaptability designs.

    “Established organizations may invest heavily in the new innovation, interpreting it as an incremental extension of the existing technology or underestimating its impact on their embedded architectural knowledge.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Modularity
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Platform Design
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 1 of 6 citations: 1 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

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Registry ID ref:62a80021369a · see in the full table