Dominant Design
Encyclopedia
Dominant design is a technology management
Technology Management
Technology Management is set of management disciplines that allows organizations to manage its technological fundamentals to create competitive advantage...

 concept identifying key technological designs that become a de-facto standard in their market place.

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...

 operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 – Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, Apple Inc. – Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...

 and IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 – 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
QWERTY
QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...

 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
Core competency
A core competency is a concept in management theory originally advocated by CK Prahalad, and Gary Hamel, two business book writers. In their view a core competency is a specific factor that a business sees as being central to the way it, or its employees, works...

 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
Population ecology
Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment. It is the study of how the population sizes of species living together in groups change over time and space....

 theory to explain why markets appear to exhibit the characteristics of punctuated equilibrium
Punctuated equilibrium
Punctuated equilibrium is a theory in evolutionary biology which proposes that most species will exhibit little net evolutionary change for most of their geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis...

.

Examples

  • The videotape format war
    Videotape format war
    The videotape format war was a period of intense competition or "format war" of incompatible models of consumer-level analog video videocassette and video cassette recorders in the late 1970s and the 1980s.- Overview :...

     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
    Peter Senge
    Peter Michael Senge is an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known as author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization from 1990...

     book The fifth discipline
    The Fifth Discipline
    The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is a book by Peter Senge focusing on group problem solving using the systems thinking method in order to convert companies into learning organizations...

    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.
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