Victor Gilsing

The Role of Alliance Network Redundancy in the Creation of Core and Non-core Technologies

This paper studies the effect of a focal firm, and its partners local alliance actions, on the creation of technological innovations by the former. More specifically, we study how two types of redundancy in a focal firms ego network affect its ability to create new technologies in its technology core areas (exploitation) and/or non-core areas (exploration). We analyse this empirically in three different industry settings: chemicals, motor vehicles, and pharmaceuticals. One of our key findings is that individual firms can indeed boost both types of innovative output by shaping the degree of redundancy in their local alliance network, but that the way in which this should be done differs between the creation of core and non-core technologies. Next, we find that it is very useful to unpack the rather abstract notion of redundancy into more specific types of redundancy in ego networks. Overall, these findings reflect an action-oriented view on the role of individual firms in collaborative networks, which may complement the dominant view in the alliance literature emphasizing the role of the overall network structure and firms network position within it.

Strategic alliance networks and innovation : a deterministic and voluntaristic view combined

Abstract Over the past decades we have witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of strategic technology alliances and a growing importance of interfirm collaboration in the high-tech sectors. The literature on these topics has grown accordingly. In this respect, our paper serves two aims. One is to provide an overview of the consensus on key issues in this vast body of literature. Second is to identify some major gaps in this literature that may inform future research. In serving these aims, we first discuss the dominant structuralist perspective that stresses the role of embeddedness, but which also reflects a deterministic stance as if firms are subject to an exogenous structure. In contrast, we also explore a more voluntaristic view of how firms may possibly shape their network in view of achieving their strategic aims. This view also seems better able to capture change and network dynamics, an issue that has been largely ignored by the structuralist view.

Persistence of, and Interrelation Between, Horizontal and Vertical Technology Alliances

The authors explore to what extent there is persistence in, and interrelation between, alliance strategies with different partner types (customers, suppliers, competitors). In a panel data set of innovation-active firms in the Netherlands from 1996 to 2004, the authors find persistence in alliance strategies with all three types of partners, but customer alliance strategies are more persistent than supplier alliance strategies and competitor alliance strategies. A positive interrelation between customer and supplier alliance strategies and a high persistence of joint supplier and customer alliance strategies are consistent with the advantages of value chain integration in innovation efforts. Prior engagement in horizontal (competitor) alliances increases the propensity to engage in vertical alliance strategies, but this effect occurs only with a longer lag. Overall, the authors’ findings suggest that alliance strategies with different partner types are both heterogeneous in persistence and (temporally) interrelated. This suggests that intertemporal relationships between different types of alliances may be as important as their simultaneous relationship in alliance portfolios.

Technology Alliances in Emerging Economies: Persistence and Interrelation in European Firms' Alliance Formation

We analyse the patterns and determinants of technology alliance formation with partner firms from emerging economies with a focus on European firms alliance strategies. We examine to what extent European firms alliance formation with partners based in emerging economies is persistent – that is, to what extent prior collaborative experience determines new alliance formation – and we compare this pattern with alliance formation with developed country partners. Second, we examine to what extent prior engagement in international alliances with partners from developed countries increases the propensity to form technology alliances with partners based in emerging economies, and vice versa (interrelation). We find that both persistence and interrelation effects are present, and that they are generally not weaker for emerging economy alliances. Alliance formation with Indian and Chinese firms is significantly more likely if firms have prior alliance experience with Japanese firms. The findings suggest that building on their prior international alliance experience firms extend their alliance portfolios across both developed and emerging economies, increasing the geographical diversity of their alliance portfolios.

Direct and mediated ties to universities: "Scientific" absorptive capacity and innovation performance of pharmaceutical firms

Extant literature on firm–university collaboration has emphasized two different strategies that firms in science-based industries adopt to source scientific knowledge and expertise. On one hand, firms engage in direct research collaborations with universities. On the other hand, firms establish indirect, mediated, ties to universities by engaging in research collaborations with dedicated biotech firms that are themselves strongly linked to universities—with the dedicated biotech firm taking the role of “broker.” We argue that the relative benefits of direct and mediated ties depend on the extent to which firms have organized their research and development to facilitate the absorption, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of scientific knowledge, which we coin “scientific absorptive capacity.” Drawing on patent and publication data in a panel of 33 vertically integrated pharmaceutical firms, we find that direct university collaboration is more beneficial for firms with relatively high scientific absorptive capacity, while only mediated ties are associated with greater innovative performance for firms with relatively low scientific absorptive capacity. The latter association is reduced if the mediated ties are with top universities. Our findings are suggestive of the importance of a “fit” between the nature of a firm’s research and development organization and its strategy to access scientific knowledge.

Strategies for designing new venture units in complex contexts

Large, mature organizations are often capable of exploiting existing products efficiently, but are typically less effective in being innovative. Financial systems and bureaucratic procedures adopted to control processes in large organizations tend to be hostile towards innovative ideas, proposals and initiatives. One of the solutions to this problem is to structurally separate exploitation tasks and innovative exploration activities, the latter, for example, in a new venture unit. On the other hand, such a structurally separate unit still needs to have some degree of integration with the parent organization, which forms the lifeline for new ventures in terms of resources and reputation. As such, the new venture unit acts as an ‘ incubation’ semi-structure that mediates organizational rigidities and supports organizational renewal by means of entrepreneurship. Previous studies have provided detailed assessments of the layout of such a new venture unit and its simultaneous integration with and separation from the host organization (e.g. Jansen et al. 2009). However, how these units are established in the first place has largely remained unaddressed. In this respect, our understanding of the process of designing such units is still in its infancy, and studies considering how designers use knowledge to deal with the complex contexts of this design process are rare. Here, this study contributes to the innovation and corporate and academic entrepreneurship literature by studying the interaction between the design processes of new venture units and diverse complex design contexts. The way designers use and process knowledge can be conceptualized in terms of three design strategies (Gavetti et al. 2008): off-line reasoning and planning, feedback-driven learning and associative reasoning. Research on designing new venture units implies that in many organizations this design process is especially driven by experimentation (i.e. feedback-driven learning) or by copying designs (i.e. associative reasoning) from other organizations (Hill and Birkinshaw 2008). An important question then is how specific contexts enable or hamper particular design strategies.

The Effect of Knowledge Decomposability on Technological Exploration in Technological Acquisitions

We study how organizational variations in a firms capability to decompose its internal knowledge elements affect the generation of exploratory technologies from technological acquisitions. We find that firms with a near-decomposable knowledge base will generate the most exploratory technologies from technological acquisitions. We further find that the magnitude of this effect can be enhanced by acquiring knowledge bases with higher malleability, or with a larger size.