Carliss Y. Baldwin
Carliss Y. Baldwin
William L. White Professor of Business Administration
| Unit | Finance |
|---|---|
| Contact | (617) 495-6673 Send E-Mail |
| Interests | design evolution, modularity, real options, technological innovation, more > |
| Overview | Biography | Publications & Course Materials | Current Research | Areas of Interest |
Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and its impact on firm strategy and the structure of business ecosystems. With Kim Clark, she authored Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity, the first of a projected two volumes. Volume 2, Modularity on Trial, will consider how modular technologies are affecting the basic structure of the global economy—for good and for bad.
Featured Work
The Impact of Modularity on Intellectual Property and Value Appropriation
with Joachim Henkel
This paper defines three generic threats to intellectual property (IP) and models the impact of modularity on these threats. It then analyzes the strategy of capturing value by maintaining exclusive control of an essential module in an otherwise open system.
The Architecture of Transaction Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Hierarchy in Two Sectors
with Jianxi Luo, Daniel Whitney and Christopher Magee
We apply network-based methods to measure the degree of hierarchy in interfirm transaction networks in two industry sectors in Japan: automotive and electronics. We find significant structural differences between the two networks and show how these differences are related to the strategies of the largest firms in each sector.
Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation
with Eric von Hippel
Organization Science, 22(6):1399-1417
We argue that innovation by individual users and open collaborative innovation increasingly compete with and may displace producer innovation in many parts of the economy.
Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis
with Alan MacCormack and John Rusnak
Research Policy, forthcoming
We examine the relationship between modularity and organizational structure in the software industry. We find consistent evidence that products developed by loosely-coupled organizations are significantly more modular than product developed by tightly-coupled organizations. Our tests support the hypothesis that products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed.