New paper about digital and physical layering in digital product innovation

26 June 2025

The paper " Layering the Architecture of Digital Product Innovations: Firmware and Adapter Layers",  by Julian Lehmann, Philipp Hukal, Jan Recker, and Sanja Tumbas, jas been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. A preprint is available here.

The study investigates how organizations layer their product architectures by embedding digital components into physical products. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of PrintCo-a desktop 3D printer firm-we show that layering a product architecture relies on creating adapter layers that facilitate connections among physical and digital components. To generate these adapter layers, PrintCo first parametrized physical components through firmware, making them controllable and addressable. PrintCo then arranged higher-order digital functionality via adapter layers that couple parametrized physical components with additional digital functionality. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a theoretical model that explains how organizations layer product architectures, what the role of adapter layers is, and how the transformation of an organization's product architecture progresses.