Radical and incremental innovations have long been the cornerstone of which firms base their knowledge and methods of technological innovation. However, this paper serves to bring attention to one of the less apparent forms of innovation, whose importance is increasingly being brought to light. Architectural innovations are, as defined by Henderson and Clark, “innovations that change the way in which the components of a product are linked together, while leaving the core design concepts (and thus the basic knowledge underlying the components) untouched”.
The paper gives an example of how Kasper, (which was at that time) the leading firm in semiconductor photolithographic alignment equipment, lost its market share to Canon; as what the engineers at Kasper assumed to be a minor incremental innovation by Canon was in actual fact, an architectural innovation. Henderson and Clark draws on this example to fully illustrate how the specialized methods in which information is efficiently......
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