Digital Innovation and the Division of Innovative Labor: Digital Controls in the Automotive Industry
研究美国汽车行业发现，数字控制系统这种数字创新会改变供应链上企业间的创新劳动分工，导致供应商在技术变革后相对减少组件创新，而大型制造商承担更多创新。
In this study of the U.S. automobile industry, we highlight the way the division of innovative labor across firms in the supply chain can be influenced by a particular form of digital innovation known as “digital control systems.” Digital control systems are becoming ubiquitous in complex products, and these digital innovations integrate other components across a product structure and introduce a level of indeterminacy and unpredictability in the organization of the interfirm division of innovative labor. Much of organizational scholarship holds that accompanying a shift toward increasingly modular product structures, component suppliers are engaging in relatively more design and invention around the components that they supply. We find that the evolution of digital controls may reverse this pattern, because in the wake of a major shift in the digital controls technology, suppliers actually engage in relatively less component innovation in comparison with their large manufacturing customers. To explain this shift, we characterize complex product structures in terms of two distinct product hierarchies: the inclusionary and the digital control hierarchy. In using this distinction to analyze the evolution of automotive emission control systems from 1970 to 1998, we reconcile two competing views about the interfirm division of innovative labor.