Mattia Bianchi

Organizing for External Technology Commercialization: Evidence from a Multiple Case Study in the Pharmaceutical Industry

External technology commercialization (ETC) is increasingly being regarded as a strategic priority by companies. ETC is the use of out-licensing to transfer technologies that are disembodied from products to other organizations. Previous research has focused on the economic and strategic dimensions but little attention has so far been paid to how ETC should be organized. This paper explores whether and how firms operating in different contexts adopt dissimilar organizational solutions for their ETC activities. To this aim, a theoretical framework is first developed that comprises the key constitutive elements of ETC organization and a number of firm-level and deal-level factors that are supposed to influence organizational design choices. Based on a multiple case-study analysis involving 16 out-licensing deals executed in seven Italian pharmaceutical firms, the paper shows that the organization of out-licensing tasks and the allocation of decision-making power is shaped by, and adapts to, the relevance of ETC in the corporate strategy, the volume of ETC transactions, the stage of development of the technology being commercialized and the competitive threats due to the deal. The paper is believed to be useful for licensing and R&D managers who can find practical insights into how ETC activities can be organized and which critical contextual factors should be accounted for when designing such organization.

Exploring the role of human resources in technology out-licensing:an empirical analysis of biotech newtechnology-based firms

Out-licensing is a technology exploitation option to generate revenues without investing in downstream complementary assets. Despite its increasing strategic relevance, the strong complexity of out-licensing activity determines a substantial discrepancy in firms’ ability to extract monetary benefits from this practice. Searching for determinants of out-licensing performance, the paper focuses in particular on the role of licensing managers. Based on a multiple case study analysis involving 26 out-licensing deals executed in seven Italian biotech NTBFs, the study shows that expert scientific skills, extensive licensing practice and prior employment in multinationals, but not an intense social network, characterise successful licensing managers, while high delegation and powerful intrinsic rewards enable individual capacities of licensing managers to translate into actual economic value.

Selling Technological Knowledge: Managing the Complexities of Technology Transactions

OVERVIEW: With the diffusion of the open-innovation paradigm, more companies are selling their technological knowledge, disembodied from physical artifacts, to other organizations in an attempt to maximize the rent-yield potential of the innovation process. However, extracting revenues from technology sale remains a challenge for most firms due to the peculiarities of technological knowledge as an object of commerce. A study of 30 companies actively involved in technology sale and 75 single transactions illuminates two key aspects of technology transactions: (1) the challenges that the technology sale process entails, and (2) the practices that can be adopted to manage the complexities of technology transactions. CTOs and R&D and technology managers can use these insights to build a firm-level capability in selling technological knowledge.

Exploring the microfoundations of external technology commercialization: A dynamic capabilities perspective

Purpose – External technology commercialization (ETC) refers to the firms transfer of technological assets, disembodied from products, to another organization involving a contractual obligation for compensation. The purpose of this paper is to identify the managerial and organizational antecedents that are capable of explaining superior capabilities in ETC.Design/methodology/approach – Starting from an in‐depth analysis of the literature about technology commercialization and adopting the dynamic capabilities strategic perspective, the study develops a theoretical framework that shows how a number of concepts (resources, capabilities and microfoundations) may affect performance in ETC. A case study analysis is conducted with illustrative purposes.Findings – The paper shows that adequate management and organization of ETC activities are needed to successfully undertake ETC. Combining evidence from a case study and findings from prior studies, research propositions are developed regarding key process, orga...

Learning to License Technology: The Role of Experience and Workforce's Skills in Spanish Manufacturing Firms

Firms increasingly pursue technology licensing for appropriating economic returns from their R&D investments. Despite this tendency, extracting revenues from licensing remains a challenge for most firms. This article explores the role of task‐specific experience and of workforce skills as determinants of superior licensing volume. The rationale is that these factors contribute to the development of a desorptive capacity that allows companies to overcome the complexities posed by technology licensing. Using panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms, we find that prior experience in licensing positively affects licensing revenues at a decreasing rate. These learning‐by‐doing effects are strengthened when firms have a higher proportion of their workforce endowed with advanced skills, whereas they are reduced when firms have a higher proportion of low‐skilled employees. These results contribute to licensing and open innovation research by partly specifying the nature and anatomy of desorptive capacity and by highlighting the key role of intellectual human capital in licensing, whose contribution depends on the skills level. They also inform managers on the mechanisms that can enhance their firms’ licensing volume.

Selecting early adopters to foster the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets: Evidence from a multiple case study

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to bring new empirical evidence to the controversial role of early adopters in the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets. Design/methodology/approach The authors apply an actor market configuration perspective to the analysis of four longitudinal case studies regarding the commercialization of new products in the textile, plastic and energy industries. Findings The diffusion of innovation is an interactive and iterative process where the commercializing firm engages in repeated interactions with different categories of companies that are targeted as potential early adopters. This process ends when the commercializing firm identifies a category of early adopters that can stimulate subsequent acceptance in the later market, by playing one of the following two roles, i.e. word-of-mouth trigger and industry benchmark. During this process, through which the role of the early adopters is constructed proactively by the commercializing firm, the product innovation is also subject to changes to provide a better fit with the selected category of early adopters. Research limitations/implications The paper calls for a re-conceptualization of the diffusion process, from a passive identification of early adopters to an interactive process that entails a trial-and-error approach in the targeting and involvement of different categories of early adopters, which ends when the innovation reaches the desired levels of diffusion. Practical implications The study provides managers with a number of recommendations for selecting the most proper category of early adopters for their innovations, depending on the role they are more likely to play and the influence they will exert on subsequent acceptance in the later market. Social implications The study provides managers with a number of recommendations for targeting, through a trial-and-error process, early adopters and working with them to champion the dissemination of new technologies. Originality/value This paper significantly adds to existing literature on the diffusion of innovation, which has up to now conceived early adopters as static and given entities, which cannot be proactively selected by the commercializing firm, and innovation as an immutable object.

A dynamic capability view on the determinants of superior performance in university technology transfer offices

In addition to the more traditional mandates of teaching and research, universities have recently amplified their missions to become increasingly entrepreneurial (Siegel 2006). Academic entrepreneurship encompasses all the activities through which universities fulfil their ‘third mission’ (economic development): patenting, licensing, creating spin-offs, investing equity in start-ups, creating technology transfer offices (TTOs), incubators and science parks (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Within the broad field of university entrepreneurship, the analysis of the commercialization processes by technology transfer offices, usually the formal gateway between university and industry, focuses on the different mechanisms through which academic research and intellectual property (IP) is capitalized and commercially exploited. The topic of TTO productivity has been quite largely studied (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Prior research, in the attempt to identify the key determinants of technology transfer (TT) success, has mainly focused on the characteristics of inventions, such as patent protection and scope (e.g., Nerkar and Shane 2007; Shane 2002). Studies such as Hsu and Bernstein (1997), Chapple et al. (2005) and Thursby and Thursby (2002), however, have shown that the value of technologies is a not sufficient driver of TT success, as many worthy IP rights remain unlicensed. Indeed, due to high transaction costs characterizing the markets for technologies (Gambardella et al. 2007), only a minority of university inventions are transferred to the industry (Di Gregorio and Shane 2003). There is indeed a need to expand the search for performance determinants to other classes of factors (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Specifically, this chapter focuses on the management and organization of TT activities as key levers to overcome market failure and increase the productivity of TTOs. The study of these aspects is particularly critical because of the complexity of technology commercialization process, which occurs in conditions of high uncertainty. The embryonic and idiosyncratic nature of academic research makes it difficult to assess its commercialization potential (Ziedonis 2007). Also, the diversity of tasks involved in the TT process requires a broad range of competencies (Geuna and Muscio 2009), that is, technical, marketing, legal and proper organizational mechanisms to integrate such knowledge. The complexity of TT activities is reflected in the substantial heterogeneity of performance among the various universities (e.g., Chapple et al. 2005; Markman et al. 2005). By tackling the following research question, ‘How do different managerial and organizational approaches to technology transfer relate to different levels of performance?’, this chapter examines TT management and organization from a comprehensive standpoint. Adopting the dynamic capabilities perspective (Teece 2007) as theoretical lens, the chapter develops an interpretative framework, which aims to identify the managerial antecedents underlying superior capabilities in commercializing academic research. The model is then illustrated through the case of two Italian universities’ TTOs, which have been active in TT for many years with very different degree of success. This work contributes to the literature on university TT in several ways. Firstly, the use of qualitative research is quite original – quantitative empirical research based on survey and patent data tend to dominate this literature – and allows an in-depth illustration of the technology transfer process as a whole. Secondly, the comprehensive description of technology transfer microfoundations is particularly relevant both theoretically, to grasp the underlying mechanisms and process dynamics of TT, and practically, to ascertain implications for the commercialization of academic knowledge. The literature on university TT is gaining in importance in entrepreneurship and management research; a growing community of scholars is collecting extensive evidence, especially on transfer performance and efficiency, but most research has an anecdotal and practice-oriented nature. Few papers adopt well-defined theoretical frameworks to explain transfer dynamics, thus robustly contributing to the debate. Following recent calls for an investigation of capabilities and skills as organizational dimensions of TTOs (e.g., Chapple et al. 2005), this chapter is, to our best knowledge, among the first research work that adopts the dynamic capabilities approach to interpret the phenomenon of TT and to analyze its dynamics. Lastly, being our work based on a European Union (EU)-funded project, we follow Conti and Gaule (2011) who call for more investigation on the specificities of practices and performance of TTOs at the European level. The chapter is structured as follows. The next sections develop the theoretical framework, review the existing literature and describe the methodology employed. This is followed by a section reporting and discussing the findings from the case studies. Finally, conclusions are drawn and some avenues for future research are outlined.