Management and Marketing - Theses
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ItemCommercialising innovation: the management of technology partnerships( 1998)The management of innovation has two stages, comprising of innovation and commercialisation. It is becoming increasingly unusual for a firm to have all the necessary resources and skills to manage these two very different activities, so getting access to these through the use of partnerships has become an increasingly important part of the innovation process. However, the use of a partner brings the problem of coordination, as well as the danger of opportunistic behaviour by the partner, either in the form of not fulfilling its responsibilities or seeking to size a larger share of the rewards from the innovation. This thesis examines the way in which innovative firms manage partnerships formed for the purpose of commercialising new technology. Drawing on a sample of 130 innovative firms, the arrangements with the partner are examined using ideas drawn from a synthesis of transaction cost economics and political economy models of organisations. The analysis is concerned with the use of explicit or formal arrangements based around rules and policies, and the use of implicit or informal arrangements based around norms of co-operation, shared values and shared rewards. Importantly, the approach in this thesis recognises that these two types of arrangements are both likely to be present in the relationship. The choice is not between one type of arrangement to the exclusion of the other, but rather, the circumstances when one type of arrangement is more in evidence. The results show that a large proportion of the preference for particular types of arrangements can be explained by the variables included in the analysis. In addition, the effect of different types of arrangements on the performance of the partnership is considered. The results show that implicit arrangements built around normative behaviour outperform explicit arrangements across each dimension of performance included in the thesis. The results are also compared to previous research into partnerships. The comparison shows that the analysis compared well statistically, although the type and performance of arrangements with partners are very different to the results in previous research. While there are a number of factors which contribute to these differences, the special case of innovative firms is considered as well as the context of partnerships dealing in the commercialisation of new technologies. The thesis concludes by suggesting directions for future research.