On the Impact of Modular Dependencies on Innovation in Organizations

In volatile and customer-driven markets, the ability to innovate is a key success factor. It has been claimed that innovations need to be implemented at a steady pace to ensure business sustainability. However, the successful implementation of innovations is only poorly understood. As a result, many organizations and governments have difficulties stimulating and managing innovation. Several authors have proposed organizational modularity as a theoretical basis to better 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. Similarly, an imperfect modular structure will exhibit obstacles when implementing innovations. Such a modularity analysis has been applied by various authors on different levels of the organization, such as products, processes, departments, and supporting IT systems. Often, an enterprise architecture framework is used to model these different levels. However, these frameworks do not adequately support the modeling of modularity characteristics. In this paper, we present three case studies to demonstrate (1) how modular dependencies impact enterprise architecture projects, and (2) how modeling modular dependencies can be used to complement existing modeling approaches.