Current trends and developments of product modularisation – a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Product modularisation continuously draws attention of scholars and practitioners since it supports organizations and industries to sustain in high product and service variety at reasonable costs and greater flexibility. This paper aims at revealing current trends and developments in the field of product modularisation by identifying the intellectual structure using a bibliometric review. Our sample accrues 1,366 publications from 2016 up to 2020 across disciplines while using bibliometric coupling composes a network. Analysing the network on similarities, we can not only find clusters of servitisation, closed-loop supply chains, and platform collaboration, because we also identify three trends of digital innovation, sustainability, and platform eco-systems. An analysis of authors currently indicates less integrated communities, which do not entirely refer to each other despite the similarity in their research. Collectively, the study suggests a timely update of current scholar activities and discussions in the field of product modularisation.