Industrial Stacks

Description

Philip Evans:

"A stack is a modular, layered, industrial architecture topped by a peering community. It pictures an industry as parsed horizontally among dissimilar “actors” (only some of which are corporations) and delivering value bidirectionally, with lower layers providing platforms on which participants in higher layers engage in peer transactions.

The skeleton of a stack is a set of rules, often contractual or embedded in the technology, by which markets, hierarchies, and self-organizing “clans” of actors coexist and coparticipate symbiotically. The stack “de-averages” motivation, agency, scale, modes of innovating, and modes of risk-taking. Stacks are newly enabled by the rise of scalable communities and by falling transaction costs. They are given urgency by the intensifying agency problems and market failures that characterize decades-old compromises at the heart of many industries. In many cases, they have advantages over traditional architectures, especially with respect to innovation, adaptability, and the efficient exploitation of scale." (http://www.bcg.com/expertise_impact/BCG_fellows/strategy/philip_evans.aspx)