Organizational Design for New Product Architecture Development: Comparative Analysis of Sharp and Casio on PDA Development

신규 제품아키텍처 개발을 위한 기업조직의 설계: PDA 개발에 있어 샤프와 카시오의 개발조직 비교 분석

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the organizational design and management of product development in creating new product architecture by an established firm. For the purpose, the paper put up the organizational design in the process of PDA(Personal Digital Assistant) development of Sharp and Casio which were Japanese major PDA firms in 1990s. PDA is the product born through architectural change from Electronic Organizer. Prior research on the product architecture change and organizational adaptation emphasized that an established firm is difficult to adapt to new product architecture due to the restriction of prior technology or organizational inertia. For overcoming these problems and successful development of new product architecture, organizational design and management in the process of product development becomes essential. In case of Sharp, corporate development project team had been used to overcome the restrictions from architectural knowledge accumulated through previous product. After launching first new PDA by corporate development project team, Sharp created a new division and pushed an evolution of PDA, when new PDA market start to grow up rapidly toward a major market segmentation. As a result, Sharp was able to build up stable PDA project trajectory. However, Casio was late for three years in launching of new PDA architecture because previous division charging of Electronic Organizer tried to develop first new PDA. Casio's PDA development was prohibited by engineers of previous division because new PDA architecture was inferior on user interface and display definition. That is, Casio's first PDA development was restricted by architectural knowledge of previous product.