Organizing Inter-Industry Architectural Innovations: Evidence from Mobile Communication Applications

This paper analyzes projects that combine technologies from different sectors to introduce inter-industry architectural innovation. These new product development (NPD) projects require detailed knowledge on how to combine hitherto unconnected technologies. Based on a comparative study of three development projects (involving telecommunications applications for mobile television, mobile banking, and mobile payment), we propose that the development of inter-industry architectural innovations benefits from an organizational configuration that (1) includes specialists from the relevant industries to obtain high-quality component input, (2) entails intense information exchange between these specialists to generate detailed architectural knowledge, and (3) facilitates timely and effective decision making between these first-time partners to prevent and resolve conflicts. Our study suggests that these requirements are met by collaborations between specialists from the different industries in which one of them takes the lead. Our findings also suggest that going it alone by start-ups as well as fifty-fifty collaborations between incumbents do not work well for this type of project.