F. Michelino

Patent data analysis of innovation behaviours in technology hardware & equipment industry

The paper presents an analytical method to define innovation behaviours and technology strategies of companies using patent data.The framework can be used to: 1) analyse single innovation behaviours, 2) map innovation strategies defined as combinations of different innovation behaviours, and 3) describe the patterns of technological evolutions over time. The methodology is tested on a sample of 133 top research and development (R&D) companies belonging to technology hardware & equipment industry, by analysing their patents applied from 2008 to 2012. From the analysis of the behaviours, a preponderance of exploitation strategies that lead to radical outputs is detected. We also uncovered a growing adoption of open innovation and an increasing concentration of R&D efforts on radical outputs.

Business Models for Open Innovation: From Collaboration to Incorporation

The paper describes five open innovation business models - collaboration, outsourcing, licensing, trading and incorporation - defined on the basis of open revenues and costs, new investments and divestments in intangibles. A sample of 271 companies from biopharmaceutical and technology hardware & equipment industries is investigated, and their annual reports for the three years period 2010-2012 are analysed. Results show that for biotech companies open innovation represents a characteristic activity, with most of them having high values of revenues deriving from joint development projects. On the other side, for pharmaceutical firms open innovation is somehow ancillary: even if most open innovation activities are widespread, their values are not really significant if compared to the total business volume. As to the technology hardware & equipment industry, the use of spin-ins as a mean for incorporating external knowledge is the most frequent open strategy. This work contributes to the research on open innovation by defining the business models that R&D intense companies may adopt to foster open innovation. From a managerial point of view, the framework can be used by companies for assessing the status of their own open strategies, also allowing the benchmarking with competitors.

Inter-Firm Relationship Governance in the Internet Era: Evidences From an Italian Survey

This contribution presents some results of the research „Internet and supply chain management: new organisational and managerial models“ based on a survey on 1458 firms operating in Italy and having more than 50 million euros turnover. 463 firms have taken part in the research, with a 31,8 % response rate.