Realising partial mirroring in a component specialised firm: evidence from the hard disk drive industry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Modularity literature proposes the ‘mirroring hypothesis’: firms achieve better product development performance when their organisational design and scope of knowledge at the firm level correspond to product architecture. For component firms, it is difficult to adapt architectural change from the modular phase to the integration phase because they specialise in a limited component area. Recent studies have suggested that ‘partial mirroring’ or ‘misting’ can be efficient for coping with a change in product architecture, proposing that firms should hold broader knowledge boundaries beyond their firm’s boundaries. However, the R&D organisational structure that enables component firms to acquire a broad knowledge base that extends beyond their component business is unclear. We conducted a case analysis of the hard disk drive industry, investigating the R&D activities of single-component firms that have survived architectural change. We used patent data focusing on three levels of analysis: organisation, group, and individual. The results showed that partial mirroring in component firms can be realised based on boundary spanning structures in R&D organisations. Integrating engineers occupy a central position in the collaboration network and coordinate component knowledge based on their understanding of technology that had a common foundation among components.