Christos Kolympiris

Profiting from external knowledge: the impact of different external knowledge acquisition strategies on innovation performance

Innovation is key to company growth, but hinges on timely access to new knowledge. Individual companies have difficulty pursuing innovation and acquiring the knowledge they need on their own. Companies therefore resort to various governance modes (licensing-in, collaborations, mergers and acquisitions, etc.) that suit the preferred innovation trajectories. We expect governance modes directed at knowledge exploration to generate long-term, radical innovations, and governance modes aimed at knowledge exploitation to generate short-term, incremental innovations. Employing data from two Dutch community innovation surveys, we indeed discovered that companies that license in technology tend to produce more incremental innovations. We also found a strong positive correlation between inter-organisational collaboration and both long-term and short-term innovation. Finally, we concluded that M&As have a major impact on the production of long-term radical innovations.

The geographic extent of venture capital externalities on innovation

A stream of literature has demonstrated that venture capital generates externalities that enhance the knowledge base of a given region and accordingly assist firms in high-technology industries to improve their innovative performance. What has gone largely unexamined in this literature is the geographic extent of such externality impact. In this research we address the issue at hand. We do so by analyzing the association between the patenting rate of all life sciences firms (LSFs) that have won Small Business Innovation Research grants from 1983 to 2006 and the venture capital investments that have occurred at increasingly distant spatial units from those firms. Controlling for firm-specific and environmental factors as well as for endogeneity concerns, we document that LSFs tend to produce more patents whenever they are situated in very close proximity to where venture capital investments occur. Further, we find that improvements of the patenting rate of focal firms largely emanate from investments that reflect the expertise of venture capitalists on advancing existing prototypes closer to commercialization. We conclude the paper with a discussion on research and policy implications of our findings.

A survey on information sources used by academic researchers to evaluate scientific instruments

Most scientific research is fueled by research equipment (instruments); typically hardware purchased to suit a particular research question. Examples range from 17th century microscopes to modern particle colliders and high-throughput sequencers. Here, we studied the information sources used by academic researchers to assess scientific instruments, and reveal evidence of a worrying confluence of incentives similar to those that drove the biopharmaceutical industry to adopt controversial practices such as ghostwriting and hidden sponsorship. Our findings suggest there are little understood incentives against disclosure in the peer-reviewed literature on scientific instruments; constituting an underappreciated threat to scientific standards of trustworthiness and transparency. We believe that a public debate and subsequent editorial policy action are urgently required.

The Technology Cycle and Technology Transfer Strategies

University technology transfer offices (TTOs) must make decisions about whether and how to commercialize university innovations and do so with little or no information about the ultimate market value of the products that might eventually be derived from those innovations. Using technology life cycle theory, we derive and assess the usefulness of metrics that could provide additional information to assist in TTO decision making. We find that being able to locate a given innovation along a life cycle progression can decrease the uncertainty inherent in technology transfer decisions.

Technology Transfer in Agriculture: The Case of Wageningen University

Even though returns on RD (2) implementation of a general legal framework of technology transfer to unburden departments, scientists, and IP staff; (3) embracing a culture where the prime driver for technology transfer is a “responsibility to give back to society” rather than income; and (4) embedding itself in a location where ties with industry are the norm. Our work is timely because technology transfer to industry is increasingly pursued at universities across the globe. The success of those efforts is not always guaranteed. We inform stakeholders and researchers by presenting a better understanding of what works and what does not work in technology transfer in agriculture.

How Venture Capital Creates Externalities in the Bioeconomy: A Geographical Perspective

A stream of literature has demonstrated that venture capital generates externalities that enhance the knowledge base of a given region and accordingly assist high technology firms to improve their innovative performance. What has gone largely unexamined in this literature is the geographic extent of such externality impact. In this research we address the issue at hand. We do so by analyzing the association between the patenting rate of all life sciences firms that have won Small Business Innovation Research grants from 1983 to 2006 and the venture capital investments that have occurred at increasingly distant spatial units from those firms. Controlling for firm-specific and environmental factors as well as for endogeneity concerns, we document that life sciences firms tend to produce more patents whenever they are situated in very close proximity to where venture capital investments occur. Further, we find that improvements of the patenting rate of focal firms largely emanate from investments that reflect the expertise of venture capitalists on advancing existing prototypes closer to commercialization. We conclude the paper with a discussion on research and policy implications of our findings.