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From Manufacturing to Design

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07-057 Copyright © 2007 by Sylvain Lenfle and Carliss Y. Baldwin Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. From Manufacturing to Design: An Essay on the Work of Kim B. Clark Sylvain Lenfle* Carliss Y. Baldwin† March 2007 * University of Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy, France Management Research Center, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France [email protected] † Harvard Business School Boston, MA 02163 [email protected] We thank Didier Chabaud and Yannick Perez for giving us the idea to write this paper. We are extremely grateful to Robert Hayes and Steven Wheelwright who spoke to us at length about the history and intellectual environment of the POM/TOM group in the 1980s and 1990s. And we thank Eric von Hippel for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. Any mistakes or omissions are ours alone, and we apologize for them in advance.FROM MANUFACTURING TO DESIGN … MARCH 16, 2007 2 From Manufacturing to Design: An Essay on the Work of Kim B. Clark Sylvain Lenfle and Carliss Y. Baldwin Abstract Kim Clark occupies a unique place in management scholarship. As a member of the Technology and Operations Management unit of Harvard Business School, he participated in several major research initiatives during the 1980s and early 1990s, before becoming Dean of the School in 1995. And even as Dean, he continued to pursue research until 2005, when he left Harvard to become President of Brigham Young University—Idaho. In this paper, we describe Clark’s research and discuss his contributions to management and economics. We look at three distinct bodies of work. In the first, Clark (in conjunction with Robert Hayes and Steven Wheelwright) argued that the abandonment by U.S. managers of manufacturing as a strategic function exposed U.S. companies to Japanese competition. In the second research stream, conducted with Wheelwright, Bruce Chew, Takahiro Fujimoto, Kent Bowen and Marco Iansiti, Clark made the case that product development could be managed in new ways that would lead to significant competitive advantage for firms. Finally, in work conducted with Abernathy, Rebecca Henderson and Carliss Baldwin, Clark placed product and process designs at the center of his explanation of how innovation determines the structure and evolution of industries. Key words: manufacturing—new product development—innovation—industry evolution—dominant design—product architecture—architectural innovation—design theory—modularity—user innovation—theory of the firm JEL Classification: B31, M1, O31, O32FROM MANUFACTURING TO DESIGN … MARCH 16, 2007 3 1. Introduction Kim Bryce Clark, a labor economist educated at Harvard University, joined the Harvard Business School faculty in the Production and Operations Management (POM) area in 1978. Shortly thereafter he began collaborations with colleagues William J. Abernathy, Robert H. Hayes and Steven Wheelwright.1 These associations were to have a profound effect on the direction of Clark’s work, which up to that time had focused on the determinants of structural unemployment (Clark and Summers, 1982) and the impact of unionization on productivity (Clark, 1980a & b; 1984). Clark was active as a researcher at Harvard Business School from 1978 to 1995, when he became Dean of the School. Even then, he continued to pursue research until 2005, when he left Harvard to become President of Brigham Young University— Idaho. Early in his career, Clark came to believe that management plays a fundamental role in companies’ performance and therefore in the economy. This conviction would guide all of his subsequent research: it also explains why he was drawn to senior management roles, first as dean of a business school and then as president of a university. In this paper, we describe Clark’s research and discuss his contributions to management scholarship and economics. We look at three distinct bodies of work. In the first, Clark (in conjunction with Robert Hayes and Steven Wheelwright) argued that the abandonment by U.S. managers of manufacturing as a strategic function exposed U.S. companies to Japanese competition in terms of the cost and quality of goods. In the second, conducted with Wheelwright, Bruce Chew, Takahiro Fujimoto, Kent Bowen and Marco Iansiti, Clark made the case that product development could be managed in new ways that would lead to significant competitive advantage for firms. Finally, in work conducted with Abernathy, Rebecca Henderson and Carliss Baldwin, Clark placed product and process designs at the center of his explanation of how innovation determines the structure and evolution of industries. Clark’s work occupies a unique place in management scholarship for three reasons. First, he tended to focus on little known and under-appreciated management groups: manufacturing managers, product development managers, and product and process architects. Thus he intentionally positioned 1 From the mid 1980s, the group was called “Technology and Operations Management” (TOM) which, as we shall see, was emblematic of the evolution of the group’s research agenda.FROM MANUFACTURING TO DESIGN … MARCH 16, 2007 4 himself outside the “traditional” management disciplines of strategy, finance, marketing and organizational behavior. Second, Clark swam against prevailing methodological currents by relying heavily on comparative and longitudinal field studies. As was the tradition at Harvard Business School, he observed practice in detail before trying to build theory or design empirical studies. His work on the automobile industry (Abernathy, Clark and Kantrow, 1983; Clark, Chew and Fujimoto, 1987; Clark and Fujimoto, 1991) is an example of what can be gained from this deeply grounded approach. Third, Clark looked beyond the boundaries of his own field to design theory, the engineering sciences, and finance for frameworks that would help him address the questions he sought to answer. As time went on, his theories became increasingly broad-based and inter-disciplinary. His crossing of disciplinary boundaries may explain why Clark’s work is usually not included in collections of works by leading scholars in the fields of management and organization theory. This paper is organized as


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