DESIGNING FOR INNOVATION BY APPLYING ORGANIZATIONAL MODULARITY

Philip Huysmans

2011

Abstract

In volatile and customer-driven markets, the ability to innovate is a key success factor. Innovations have to be implemented at a steady pace to ensure business sustainability. However, the innovation process is only poorly understood. Therefore, many organizations and governments have difficulties stimulating and managing innovation. Several authors have proposed organizational modularity as a theoretical basis to understand and manage innovation. Their main argument is that a modular structure enables parallel evolution of different organizational modules. Consequently, innovations can be implemented without being limited by implementation aspects of other organizational modules. Modularity has been applied by various authors on different levels of the organization, such as products, processes, departments, and supporting IT systems. Moreover, enterprise architecture frameworks allow the modeling of different viewpoints of an organization. However, few organizations can be considered to have completely decoupled organizational layers. Consequently, dependencies between organizational modules on different enterprise architecture layers can heavily impact the ability to introduce innovations. In this paper, we demonstrate how modular dependencies impact enterprise architecture projects in two case studies. We then present a case study to illustrate how a modular dependency approach can be used to complement existing modeling approaches.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Huysmans P. (2011). DESIGNING FOR INNOVATION BY APPLYING ORGANIZATIONAL MODULARITY . In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD, ISBN 978-989-8425-68-3, pages 51-60. DOI: 10.5220/0004458500510060


in Bibtex Style

@conference{bmsd11,
author={Philip Huysmans},
title={DESIGNING FOR INNOVATION BY APPLYING ORGANIZATIONAL MODULARITY},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD,},
year={2011},
pages={51-60},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004458500510060},
isbn={978-989-8425-68-3},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design - Volume 1: BMSD,
TI - DESIGNING FOR INNOVATION BY APPLYING ORGANIZATIONAL MODULARITY
SN - 978-989-8425-68-3
AU - Huysmans P.
PY - 2011
SP - 51
EP - 60
DO - 10.5220/0004458500510060