Dominant design

Dominant design is a technology management concept introduced by Utterback and Abernathy in 1975, identifying key technological features that become a de facto standard. A dominant design is the one that wins the allegiance of the marketplace, the one that competitors and innovators must adhere to if they hope to command significant market following.

When a new technology emerges (e.g. computer GUI operating systems) – often firms will introduce a number of alternative designs (e.g. Microsoft – Windows, Apple Inc. – Mac OS and IBM – OS/2). Updated designs will be released incorporating incremental improvements. At some point, an architecture that becomes accepted as the industry standard may emerge such as Microsoft Windows. The dominant design has the effect of enforcing or encouraging standardization so that production or other complementary economies can be sought. Utterback and Suarez (1993) argue that the competitive effects of economies of scale only become important after the emergence of a dominant design, when competition begins to take place on the basis of cost and scale in addition to product features and performance.

Dominant designs may not be better than other designs; they simply incorporate a set of key features that sometimes emerge due to technological path-dependence and not necessarily strict customer preferences. The often cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, specifically designed to overcome operative limitations on the mechanical typewriter but now almost universally preferred over other keyboard designs. Dominant designs end up capturing the allegiance of the marketplace and this can be due to network effects, technological superiority, or strategic manoeuvering by the sponsoring firms.

Dominant designs are often only identified after they emerge. Some authors consider the dominant design as emerging when a design acquires more than 50% of the market share. A more promising approach is to study the specific product innovations introduced by different firms over time to determine which ones are retained.

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