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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Product architecture
• mirroring hypothesis
• firm boundaries
• knowledge boundaries

Acknowledgements

The author is gratified to Editor-in-Chief, Professor James Fleck and to receive the insightful comments offered by the anonymous peer reviewers. The author is also grateful to Christina Ahmadjian (Hitotsubashi University) and Norifumi Kawai (Sophia University) for comments on the previous versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant Number JP16K03889 and JP20K01945, and the Academic Association for Organizational Science.

Notes on contributors

Genjiro Kosaka

Genjiro Kosaka is a professor of the Faculty of Economics at Sophia University, Japan. He received his Ph.D. from Hitotsubashi University in 2010. His research interests include technological change, product architecture, buyer-supplier relationship and team management. He served as the board member of Academic Association for Organizational Science (Japan) and the associate editor of Journal of Business Management (Japan).