Automotive firms are facing increasing pressures in order to remain competitive. The evolution and transformation of technologies, market structure and customer needs push firms to reduce the time to market of products, increase technological and organizational flexibility and gain access to available-within and outside the firm, local and global-competences and capabilities. Firms are attempting to achieve higher product variety, lower costs and lead times by introducing modularization within their product configuration.
This paper aims to provide preliminary empirical results on the effects of components modularization on supply chain relations and point out the new “knowledge requirements” which both assemblers and suppliers are attempting to achieve. Specifically, it aims to investigate the dynamic linkages among new product configuration based on modularity, assemblers’ and suppliers’ organisational architectures and their internal balance of technical and organizational competences. In order to explore such dynamics