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This paper demonstrates that the existing understanding of technological newness in product innovation lacks nuance and does not properly explain the concept of modular innovation that can lead to radical product innovation. We apply a careful examination of two technologically new products: Tesla’s car (an all-electric car) and iRobot’s Roomba (an autonomous vacuum cleaner). Product innovation in management science often refers to the function and utility of products, while our view on product innovation emphasizes the architecture of the technology itself. Using extensive data on the product architectures and patent data of components and modules within the studied products, we gain a comprehensive understanding of why these new technologies are really new. Through the nexus of engineering science and management science, we understand that modular innovation, in contrast to previous notions, can trigger architectural innovation and eventually radical product innovation. Our crystallization of the term ‘new technology’ at the system, function, module, and component levels, thus, paves the way for an argument for why some product innovations are grown in a sequence from modular to architectural and, then, to radical innovation. We identify specific modules in each product and highlight specific novelties in product modules. Finally, we discuss, conceptually, how technological newness in modules affects changes in product structures and interfaces. This discussion of modular and architectural innovation is tied to a dynamic model describing how we can differentiate incremental product innovation from radical product innovation. Our research, thus, touches on a long-called-for discussion on technological newness in product innovation and adds insight to the seminal work on modular and architectural innovation initially conducted by Henderson and Clark in 1990.

In an electromechanical valve actuated engine, the valves are driven by solenoid-type actuators and cam-shaft is eliminated. Control of each valve provides flexibility in valve timings over all engine conditions and achieves the benefits of variable valve timing(VVT). This paper is about investigation of Electro-mechanical actuator at simulated pressure conditions for a single cylinder engine. For this purpose, a scaled down actuator with reduced armature lift and high stiffness springs are being used. Experiments are conducted to measure valve release timings, transition times and contact velocities. Furthermore, discussion about the spring, magnetic, exhausts gas forces and their ability to actuate the system as desired.

To enable product configuration of a product family, it is important to develop a model of the selected product family. From such a model, an often performed practice is to make a product configurator from which customers can specify individual products from the family. To get further utilisation of the product family model, however, the model should be enriched with data for planning and execution of the manufacturing processes. The idea is that, when any individual product is specified using the product configurator, a product model can be extracted with all data necessary for planning of the manufacturing processes. Obviously, data for identification of all used modules and components are included in the product model but also for instance data for processing and assembly operations must be available. These data are not always related entirely to the modules and components but are sometimes also dependent on the specific assembly structure of the configured product, i.e. the combination of modules. In this paper, issues of how to create manufacturing structures and related planning data in product family models are presented. Primarily, the more complicated multi-level manufacturing structures are regarded and it is argued that the models need to specify other structures for manufacturing compared with the product structure for configuration. Further, the problem of including attributes for of planning data is addressed and it is shown this may be complicated because such specifications may be dependent of the structure and need to be represented in a general for valid for all possible configurations.