Abstract
An enduring challenge of soaring market complexity has significant impact on global manufacturing firms. The purpose of this paper is to explore a product modularity-based routine that enables global manufacturing firms to leverage product innovation, particularly in an open challenging environment through the collaborative innovation network. Based on an analysis of the effects of product modularity on collaborative innovation, this paper develops a collaborative innovation network model featuring customer-driven, module as innovation carrier and sustainability, in which the modular product architecture (MPA) plays a role in linking customers, the core firm, and heterogeneous external partners. Next, two kinds of generic partnership management mechanisms are designed. Results in conjunction with an explorative case study show that the positive impact of product modularity on collaborative innovation is verified, which not only facilitates interactions among participants in the collaborative innovation network, but also provides an effective way for the global manufacturing firm to manage external partners.
Highlights
During the last decades, an enduring challenge of soaring market complexity has drawn much attention [1]
CASE SELECTION This study explores the influence of product modularity on the collaborative innovation network, which belongs to the problem of ‘‘How’’ and ‘‘Why’’
To illustrate how global manufacturing firms can better interact with external partners, modules within modular product architecture were treated as the innovation carrier, and a modularity-based collaborative innovation network model was constructed, in which the quality function deployment (QFD) tool and the modular function deployment (MFD) tool were adopted to map customers’ demands into concrete product properties and build the modular product architecture
Summary
An enduring challenge of soaring market complexity has drawn much attention [1]. Regarding the composition of MPA, a global manufacturing firm needs to distinguish whether modules are jointly developed with external partners or developed independently For the former, the firm mainly relies on in-house R&D; for the latter, the firm combines qualified external partners for collaborative innovation design and strives to ensure the technological competitiveness of the modules. The external partners mainly include research institutes, universities, design houses, testing laboratories, suppliers [21], innovation media and venture capital agents Under this circumstance, the global manufacturing firm plays a dominant role in absorbing and mapping customers’ demands A collaborative innovation network featuring sustainability is constructed, in which qualified external partners proactively collaborate with the global manufacturing firm to match customers’ demands. This can lead to adaptation and new organizational structures or processes that solve technological problems
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