Carliss Baldwin

Design Rules, modularity as strategy

William L. White Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School. Co-authored 'Design Rules: The Power of Modularity' (2000) with Kim Clark, a foundational text tracing how IBM's System/360 pioneered modular architecture and reshaped industry structure. Her research underpins modern thinking on platforms, open-source ecosystems, and the strategic value of decomposing complex systems.