INGENIEUR
MCC plant located in France (Hambach)
MCC plant, build and deliver complete modules
like doors and cockpits directly to the MCC final
assembly line.” Camuffo [5] continues to consider
the effects that modularity in manufacturing has
on the organisational modularity of companies
and manufacturing networks, taking up “a typical
organisational meaning and mingling with those of
standardisation, scalability and replication”, with
each “organisational module” also corresponding
to a “design module”.
In the context of design globalisation, it is
interesting to note also that “international rules
(trade barriers, local contents, etc.), regional/
national institutions, and cross-country cost
differentials impact on the transfer of component
design/manufacturing responsibility to suppliers
and, as a consequence, on the degree of
decomposability and information partitioning into
visible design rules of new and existing products
(Schilling [9]).
To conclude this section of the present paper,
it is convenient to draw on the points made by
Rycroft [10], who asserts that globalisation
“can be said to have co-evolved with rapid
and pervasive technological innovation. By
this it is meant that changes in technological
advancement appear to have helped create
increasingly global markets and other institutions,
and these ever more global political and
economic institutions appear to modify emerging
technological innovations.” Rycroft [10] goes on
to ask the question about the major indicators
of the “globalisation/technology co-evolutionary
process”. He identifies several dimensions, or
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VOL 55 JUNE 2013
groups of indicators of technological globalisation,
namely, technological exploitation, technological
generation, and technological collaboration. The
author then chooses to focus his attention on
innovation networks as organisations that can
help provide insight and measure the depth of
technological globalisation processes.
THE COMPLEX SYSTEM OF
WORLD ECONOMY
The dimension of globalisation that concerns
technology and engineering design is played out
against the backdrop of company level and national
and international level economic realities. The
world economy is one of the most important and
well-studied complex systems of great significance
to the vast proportion of the global population.
Yet, as past and recent experiences show, desp ]B