Revisiting Black-Box Governance: The Interplay between Product and Interorganizational Integration

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to understand the determinants of collaboration in black-box governance mode, defined as partnering with a supplier during product development in which the supplier has complete component design responsibility. We disentangle the interplay between inter-organizational and product integration by employing a polar case study design in two electronics companies. We investigated six dyadic buyer-supplier relationships. The first case study provided evidence that product integration does not mirror inter-organizational integration. The second case study, which focused on understanding the inter-organizational integration dimension in a context of stable product integration, showed that keeping product integration stable in black-box projects did not eliminate the need for collaboration. The ways in which the supplier configures the internal architecture of the sub-components that constitute its component through product interfaces spilled over and created an additional need for inter- organizational integration, which is against the logic of black-box governance mode.