To realize these benefits requires new organizational and institutional responses to the increased division of labor and capital. Changes in the technological structure of production must be accompanied by changes in the institutional structure of production. A variety of property right regimes, contractual relationships, and management structures must be explored to solve problems that arise with the communication and incentive that coordinate different stages of the production. The forms that will emerge depend on tradeoffs between various institutional and technological solutions to these coordination and communication problems.
One important change that arises is the need to ensure an adequate return on the investment required in developing and maintaining the capital asstes necessary for wide-scale reuse. This problem emerges whether reusable components are produced within or across firms. In fact, the problems within firms can often be usefully analyzed as analogous to problems in the market.
Investment in reusable software requires that software be managed as a valuable asset, and that the necessary organizational support be given to ensure a chance at an adequate return on the investment. This requires a long term commitment by management, including investment in the complimentary assets (infrastructure), and changes in evaluation criteria and reward structures. One of the key problems facing the firm is how to provide appropriate incentives for both the creation and use of reusable components, and assuring adequate communication of what components are available.
Much work on reuse has dealt with the most appropriate repository for reusable software components. Advances in search techniques and classification schemes provide an important area of research in improving access to components. Technological advances can help reduce the transaction costs of search: such techniques as browsers, hypertext navigation, classification methods, software agents, and good old librarians can all play an important role.
In addition to such improvements in library technology, increasing attention is being paid to the organizational incentives and communication flows needed to maintain a flow of reusable components into the library and a flow of reusable components to projects when and where they are needed. Repositories by their nature are not well suited to providing useful incentives. The problem arises of how to allocate the costs of building and maintaining the library among the various projects that use components from the libraries. Software, of course, is not subject to wear and tear, but it is subject to economic obsolescence. Continual investment is required in the maintenance of value to user. Rewards for useful contributions to the library and rewards for making use of the library need to be a fundamental aspect of project development.
Libraries as a shared resource serving many masters can be viewed as what economists call a commons. The problem is the opposite of the usual story of the commons; the problem is not the danger of overgrazing a fixed supply of pasture, but of ``undergrazing'' reusable components due to the lack of incentives and information regarding what makes for good reusable components, and when it is appropriate to use them. Care must be taken in setting up the appropriate rewards for contributions, and in reducing the costs of accessing and learning about the contents of the libraries on the part of users.
Electronic markets also offer a potential solution to the problem of affordable access to a wide variety of reusable components. Libraries are essential passive; they wait for users to come search them. Electronic markets, in contrast, reflect the active matching of buyers and sellers. Component vendors have an economic incentive to produce useful components and to reduce the transaction costs to users of gaining knowledge of and access to components. We can imagine the emergence of component brokers who try to match available components to developers' needs.