The world is increasingly turbulent with shorter and shorter technological life cycles and
more and more frequent changes in customer demand. This situation implies that flexibility
and agility are crucial for producers of products and services. Much effort has been directed
toward understanding innovation and the ways in which management can increase the value
of innovation efforts. As a consequence, suggestions emphasizing different aspects of
innovation and creativity have been put forward. However, the value of architectural
knowledge for innovation is increasingly recognized as crucial with modular architectures
proposed as one way of increasing the rate of innovation by introducing flexibility and agility
without sacrificing efficiency.
Modularity is a way to design a system with the intent of reducing its complexity by
decomposing the system and reducing interdependencies between the subsystems of the
system through standardized interfaces. Systems designed in this way allow for greater
flexibility through recombination; however, they retain efficiency by means of
standardization and scale economies from the reuse of components. For this reason modular
architectures present an interesting solution to the dilemma of whether to invest in innovation
or in efficiency. The topic has received much attention in the face of demands from customers
for increasingly heterogeneous products and services. However, an important aspect to keep
in mind is that, while decomposition is a powerful way of reducing complexity, most real
systems remain only nearly decomposable (Simon, 1962) or loosely coupled rather than
uncoupled (Orton & Weick, 1990)...