Dominant design evolution: strategic implications for firms in the smartphone market

Abstract

This project aims to understand the common themes that drive the evolution of the dominant design and then derive implications that affect the strategic actions the firms must undertake to eventually succeed in an industry where a dominant design may emerge. The smartphone industry has been analyzed to check for the possibility of the emergence of a dominant design. The analysis indicates that the smartphone industry is currently in the fluid stage of evolution of a dominant design. Hence it is not possible to define the eventual dominant design in case of the smartphone. But key trends that would influence the plans and actions of the players have been discussed. This study has been able to derive certain implications for strategic actions for the key segments of the market. The possible evolutionary path of the smartphones could involve:1. The themes of performance improvement, feature addition and consolidation at the device chipset level as well as the operating system will progress in parallel. Once the smartphone is able to provide basic document processing and web browsing experience as compared with PC, the performance improvement or device architectural changes would happen at lower rate and we will enter the transitional phase. In this phase there would eventually be few operating systems(either open source or proprietary) deployed on majority of the smartphones. Thus there could be a dominant design in terms of the features and OS features as in the case of the PC.2. The few smartphone players who would work well with the operators and provide users with applications and content they require will eventually stand to gain due to access to complementary assets and network effects.