Conference Keynote by Carliss Y. Baldwin of HBS.
Behind every innovation lies a new design. Large or complex designs, involving many people, require architectures that create a sensible subdivision of the design tasks.
Design architectures (and the systems built from them) may be "manageable" or "unmanageable." By manageable, I mean that the artifacts created within the architecture will stay within the boundaries of a single enterprise (or a supply chain controlled by a dominant firm). Windows and Office are manageable architectures by this definition, whereas Apache and Linux are coordinated but not manageable. "Manageable" architectures give rise to product lines and product families, while "unmanageable" architectures give rise to modular clusters and open source communities.
There are important technical properties of a design architecture that affect its manageability. In this speech, I will talk about how designs draw resources from the economy, and what technical properties make an architecture "manageable" or "unmanageable." These properties, I will argue, are not good or bad in themselves, but they affect economic incentives and patterns of competition over new products and designs. Thus design architecture is an important consideration in formulating a sound product line strategy.
