Webinar
A Preview of Design Rules, Vol. 2:
How Technology Shapes Organizations
Carliss Baldwin
William L. White Professor of Business Administration, Emerita at Harvard Business School
--- 25th July 2024, Thursday at 9 AM EST/3 PM CET---
Prof. Baldwin will share with us insights from her new book “Design Rules, Vol. 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations”, which presents a general theory explaining how technology shapes organizations in a market economy:
Despite excellent work by several scholars, we still lack a concept of “technology” that can support rigorous inquiry and theory-building. The first step in developing a new theory is to change the “building blocks”—the fundamental units of analysis in the economic system. The fundamental units of technological analysis are not prices, transactions, or contracts and information flows — the foundations of transaction cost economics, principal-agent theory, and property rights theory. Instead, the fundamental units specified by technologies are tasks to be performed and transfers of material, energy and information between tasks. Together, the tasks and transfers change the material world in ways that are beneficial to some subset of people in the system. Transactions and contracts must be located within a technologically determined task network and agents must have the ability and incentives to perform the specified tasks and transfers. Finally, principals must design organizations and social institutions capable of getting the work done.
About the Speaker:
Carliss Y. Baldwin is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and its impact of design architecture on firm strategy, platforms, and business ecosystems. She has won numerous awards for research: most recently, she received a Doctor honoris causa from the Technical University Munich in 2014, and in 2015 was named the Distinguished Scholar of the Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) division of the Academy of Management. Her work has been published in a variety of leading journals including Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Research Policy and Harvard Business Review. With Kim Clark, she authored Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity. Her much-anticipated new book, Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations, will be published end of 2024.
Live webinar is open to all.
Registration closes 24th July, 2024 at 10 am (eastern time)
Hope you will be able to join us!
