Abstract
Under the technological innovation network, loosely coupled organizations featured by weak connections and relative independence have formed through the dynamic division of labor and knowledge sharing of enterprises. The loosely coupled organizations greatly enhance cooperation performance, but face problems such as poor flexible matching between partners and low innovation efficiency. Meanwhile, modular organizations can connect with other organizations to realize a specific operational goal via contracts and carry prominent features such as collaborative innovation, adaptive division of labor, and dynamic capabilities, offering an effective network governance model for collaboration between enterprises. Based on the two dimensions (looseness and coupling) between organizations, this paper uses the design dependency matrix (DDM) to map demands for functional/design modules, under the division of labor within products and the decisions on product modules, and preliminarily decouple the functional/design modules. Based on clustering DDM, a decision structure matrix (DSM) was constructed, and the clustering decoupling algorithm was adopted to create clustering design structure modules. Referring to these clustering modules, intraproduct division of labor was performed to realize the modular cooperation between organizations.
Highlights
E homogeneous competition strategy, which is common in the industrial economy era, has been replaced by the heterogeneous cooperation strategy based on the complementarity of production knowledge [5]
According to the division of labor, enterprises combine cooperation contracts dynamically into a flexible contract network. e modular nodes in the network can perform adaptive division of labor and collaborative innovation. is simplifies the control of complex systems [6], enhances the innovation of product development, and shortens the time for the products to hit the market. e modular network organization is generally characterized by low density and high centrality [7]
Organizations are troubled by the poor flexible matching between partners and the low innovation efficiency. e main cause of these troubles is that the organizations, through cooperation and innovation, form loosely coupled organizations in the form of a dense or sparse network; there have not been modular organizations that are tightly correlated and loosely coupled
Summary
Modularization as a concept can be tracked back to Simon’s nearly decomposable system. E “final assembly plant” of the enterprise plays the role of interface rule designer in the integration operation of these modules It is responsible for establishing the structure and interface between modules and ensuring that the interaction and coupling between modules meet the preformulated standards so that the whole supply chain forms a modular network structure. E above analysis shows that there are controversies in the relationship between product modularity and organization modularity, the mainstream research is inclined to study the corresponding and matching relationship between technology and organization, as well as the “mirror” hypothesis which is closely related to the product design. If rule G is an industrial standard for new products (manual response), Figure 1(b) is loosely coupled organizations.
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