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By adopting challenging targets on environmental performance, pro-active industrial firms may push themselves towards discontinuous product innovation. Such innovation can be understood as being either architectural, i.e. arranging components in new ways, or modular, i.e. introducing new technologies in specific components or subsystems. We argue that these two dimensions of discontinuous change call for some specific managerial responses. Architectural innovation challenges the whole engineering organisation, making it necessary to focus development efforts on technological interfaces, whereas modular innovation has a more isolated effect, making specialisation and co-ordination over organisational boundaries particularly important. Altogether, our analysis highlights the importance of adapting the project organisation to the development task and addressing part-whole relationships when managing innovation in established products and systems, something that becomes increasingly important in the strive towards sustainable development.
Magnusson et al. (Sat,) studied this question.