Dominant design

Dominant design is a technology management concept identifying key technological designs that become a de-facto standard in their market place.

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. Microsoft – Windows, Apple Inc. – Mac OS and IBM – OS2). Updated designs will be released incorporating incremental improvements – at some point an architecture that becomes accepted as the industry standard (Anderson and Tushman, 1990) may emerge (e.g. Microsoft Windows).

Dominant designs may not be better than other designs in the market place, however they will incorporate a minimum required set of key features. The often cited example of the QWERTY keyboard, specifically designed to overcome limitations on the mechanical typewriter but now almost universally preferred over more logical keyboard designs. 6

Utterback and Abernathy first used the term 'dominant design' in 1975.

Core rigidities

Over a period of time suppliers to a market place will invest more resource (from research and development capabilities 7, employee skillsets and machine tooling to business process support) into the dominant design. Its core competency will become ever more closely aligned to the dominant design, these core competencies serve it well as long as the dominant design continues to dominate.

However when a new design emerges that has sufficient improvements over the dominant design, these core competencies become core rigidities. There are numerous examples of companies unable to adjust themselves to new technologies exploited by companies with less investment in the dominant design.

Population ecology theory

Work on dominant designs largely emerged from work on applying population ecology theory to explain why markets appear to exhibit the characteristics of punctuated equilibrium.

Examples

• The videotape format war between Betamax and VHS, when VHS became the de facto video tape standard.
• Microsoft Windows has become the dominant design in PC operating systems.
• David Pogue in a review of the Samsung Z5 MP3 player articulated the Apple/iPod dominant design in the NY Times March 9, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/technology/circuits/09pogue.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
• Many industry examples are included in Utterback's book Mastering the dynamics of innovation (see references below)
• DC-3 Peter Senge book The fifth discipline on p. 6 cited the DC-3 as a dominant design consisting of variable pitch propeller, retractable landing gear, monocque, radial air-cooled engine, and wing flaps.

References

1. Changing the Dominant Design (Gary S Vasilash) [1]
2. Invention and innovation: an introduction – Open University – [2]
3. Innovations and Dominant Design in Mobile Telephony from The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy – Koski and Kretschmer [3]
4. Why the World Went Windows [4]
5. Environment: Opportunity or Threat? – Clive Savory
6. The Curse of Qwerty Jared Diamond [5]
7. Role of universities in the product development process: strategic considerations for the telecommunications industry, Alok K Chakrabati [6]
8. Dominant Designs and the Survival of Firms – Utterback and Suarez [7]
9. Mastering the dynamics of innovation, Utterback (1994) Harvard Business School Press ISBN 0-87584-342-5 Library call numbers HD58.8.U87 1994 658.4'06—dc20