ABSTRACT
Very often, the design and the manufacturing of a product architecture amounts to that of a complex system, as ‘one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a non simple way’ (Simon 1962: 468). In front of it, bounded rational economic agents thus need to resort to behavioral patterns of problem solving and search routines which have been proved to be suitably described by the so called NK methodology, developed by Kauffman (1993) with respect to the interdependencies of the genomes of organisms. Thinking of a product architecture as a string of N product components, each of which is interdependent with K others, and attaching to each component a ‘fitness value’ which measures its contribution to the overall (economic) fitness of the product, the firm’s capacity to pursue the latter can be shown to depend on the product architecture itself, and on the size of K in particular.3
