Increasing complexity and limits of organization in the microlithography industry: implications for science-based industries

This paper tries to clarify how current science-based industries become required to respond to their rapidly advancing complexity and what kinds of new organizational forms are inevitable to cope with such complexity. The microlithography industry is used for this purpose as a typical example. The central analytical concept is “interim modularity,” defined as the modular architecture at trial-and-error development and/or prototyping phases, to effectively orchestrate the dispersion of specialized knowledge and know-how over a wide range of professionals inside and outside of corporations. Such complex tools have to be system-designed with built-in interim modularity for pre-architecture search and post-architecture finetuning.