Dominant design or multiple designs: The Flash Memory Card case

Literature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as the dominant one to the detriment of the others. Various factors and forces have been identified to explain this phenomenon. Yet, sometimes no dominant design emerges at all and multiple competing designs coexist in the market together. The flash memory card industry provides an example of this. In this study we use this example as a case for investigating the circumstances under which an industry will have a tendency toward multiple ldquodominantrdquo designs. The case shows that a combination of factors may result in multiple designs and we argue that such a combination of factors will increasingly also apply in other cases.