Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation

Volume 5, Issue 1, September/October 2003 INNOVATION: management, policy & practice This book focuses on the strategic problems faced by firms in industries dominated by platform products.1 Gawer and Cusumano recommend that firms compete by developing modular products, because it allows for increased”... ability to innovate [italics in origin] by more actors in the high-tech world” (p.3). Modularity and platform products are found in industries which produce complex products which are built of interdependent components and subsystems. Examples include cars, radios, refrigerators, and stereo systems. The key attribute of these industries, whose number is rapidly increasing, is a network of interdependent producers of different parts of the product who also have the “license” to rapidly innovate without violating the integrity of the overall joint product.2 Gawer and Cusumano, contend that because the design and production of complex modular products involves interdependencies which transcend organizational boundaries, firms must focus strategically, organizationally, and technologically on the management of complementary assets needed by their organization and their product and network externalities created through the development and use of their products. Successful implementaB O O K S rev ews & lists