Cluster Complexes: Civil Aerospace

To manage the required scale, risks and specialisation, the system integrators are now concentrated with just four players in civil aerospace, but with a developed internationalised production system. While design is a core competency of system integrators such as the assemblers and first tier suppliers, increasingly some development costs are pushed out to suppliers (see Nolan et al. 2007). Increasingly the Primes are turning to loosely coupled networks of suppliers and the modularisation of production to enable them to take advantage of fast moving areas of science and technology while maintaining effort in slower moving areas (see Brusoni et al., 2001).