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I must narrow down to some degree what I mean by 'committed documentary.'[...] By 'commitment' I mean, first, a specific ideological undertaking, a declaration of solidarity with the goal of [...]

This paper elaborates on how design rules emerge and evolve as firms' micro-level choices of product and organization architectures coevolve with changes in product markets and an industry's competitive and cooperative dynamics. We suggest that the design rules a firm adopts will vary according to firms' strategic choices of product and organization architectures that they believe are or may become feasible in a given industry. Building on the mirroring hypothesis that product designs a firm adopts will influence the organization designs it uses, we develop a model that identifies key relationships that influence firms' strategic choices of product and organization architectures and associated design rules. We then elaborate on key interactions between firm-level architectural choices and the architecture-enabled competitive and cooperative dynamics that obtain in an industry. Our model identifies strategically important aspects of open- and closed-system architectures and modular and nonmodular architectures that impact industry structures, interfirm interactions, and resulting industry dynamics. Drawing on these analyses, we suggest how firms' strategic choices of architectures are influenced by their assessments of (i) the potential for capturing value through both gains from specialization and gains from trade that firms believe will be enabled by their architectural choices and (ii) both ex ante and ex post transaction costs implied by their architecture decisions. We conclude by suggesting how the perspective on firm's strategic architectural decisions we develop here enables new approaches to understanding evolutions of both product markets and industry structures for serving product markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the co-evolution of product and industry architecture by drawing on a longitudinal study of the UK personal pensions industry between 2005 and 2020. It provides qualitative evidence for the way in which institutional structures, particularly regulation, entwine with firm strategic choices to shape the contours of an industry value chain (IVC). We draw upon modularity theory and the literature on industry architecture to consider how strategic bottlenecks emerged and how value shifted between layers of the IVC. Furthermore, we examine the interplay between the agendas of the regulator and firm strategic responses to unpack how firms (product providers) responded by pursuing integrative innovation and less specialization to mitigate the effects of value migration to strategic bottlenecks. Our findings extend recent work on product and industry architecture, highlighting how markets evolve toward less modular product configurations and less industry specialization in response to these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]