Carliss Baldwin & Kim Clark — Design Rules: How IBM Created Ecosystems (and Competitors)
About this episode
Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark discuss the significance of modularity in product design and its implications for competition and innovation.
"The act of modularizing your product is the very act of inviting your future competitors into existence." Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark, authors of the landmark Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, join Aidan McCullen for an Innovation Show exclusive. Their book is the Rosetta Stone of platform strategy — the mechanic underneath the Innovator's Dilemma — and it has never been more relevant than in this age of AI. In this conversation, Carliss and Kim reveal: Why the power of modularity underpins Moore's Law — and everything digital around us How IBM engineers, locked in a Connecticut motel before Christmas, invented the first conscious modular platform strategy How the System/360 turned IBM from a competitor into "the environment" Why the engineers who walked out of IBM's San Jose plant spawned the entire disk-drive industry How IBM owned 30% of Intel and contracted Microsoft — yet failed to own the only two sources of profit in the PC ecosystem Why "the game is never incontestably won" Why Sears couldn't become Walmart, and Walmart couldn't become Amazon The Chevy Vega that shook itself apart on the test track — and the cost of losing tacit knowledge Why AI agents are forcing…
More episodes of The Innovation Show
- Usman Sheikh — How AI Will Reshape Consulting: The End of the Pyramid
- Carla Johnson — RE:Think Innovation and the Wheel of Innovation
- Jennifer Chatman — Transformational Leader or Narcissist?
- Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile, Part 2: NeXT's Failures, Pixar's Lifeline and the Road Back to Apple
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Innovation Show podcast page.