Working Paper, december 2008
Abstract:
In services-based capitalism, a growing number of firms are endeavoring to base their competitiveness on their capacity to offer solutions to certain categories of problems facing the targeted customer base. To do so, firms design a business portfolio covering a set of goods and services that complement one another in generating the desired useful effects, for which we propose the term “bouquet”. This article looks at the conditions that determine the competitiveness of bouquet offers. It shows that bouquets and modularity are two competing ways of mediating between the space of knowledge and that of needs. The commercial potential of bouquets begins where the benefits of modularity end and where integration effects lie.
