Dominant design or multiple designs: The flash memory card case

Literature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant 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. The Flash Memory Card Industry provides an example of this. In this study, we use this example as a case to investigate the circumstances under which an industry has a tendency toward multiple 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.