Genesis and Evolution of Interfaces in Product Architecture

Interfaces are elements of the product architecture that facilitates innovation and enables an organization to leverage the trade-off between cost and performance of its products. Despite the importance of interfaces for organizations, little is known about their genesis and evolution. In this study, we make one of the initial attempts to define the attributes of interdependencies managed by interfaces, which we call as interface properties, to gain a deeper insight about how interfaces emerge. By relying on secondary case data, we define four interface properties. We discuss the congruence of these properties with Herbert Simon's notion of near decomposability.