We provide greater theoretical precision to the concept of productive opportunities of Penrose. We show firm emergence as a recursive cycle of changing productive opportunities. We show how those ...opportunities result from the technological base of the firm and are associated with the particular characteristics of the technology. We also show how productive opportunities require the assembly of different internal and external resources, and therefore partners. We address explicitly how the firm and its potential partners perceive uncertainty and single out the different mechanisms used by the firm to address uncertainty—envisioning, pooling, and staging—to secure resources from external partners and exploit the identified productive opportunities in a timely manner.
•Contributes to the understanding of how fast growth of entrepreneurial science-based firms occurs.•Conceptualizes the speed of early growth as the time it takes for the assembly of three types of ...critical resources—a functionally-diverse management team, early fundraising and development of technology.•Distinguishes between “assisted” and “unassisted” paths to access critical resources, and how they combine to influence the speed of early firm growth.•Shows how manifestations of technology development act as signaling devices to attract funding and management, affecting the speed of firm growth.•Shows how the variety of paths and speed of early growth is influenced by the national institutional setting.
The paper explores the process of early growth of entrepreneurial science-based firms. Drawing on case studies of British and Dutch biopharmaceutical R&D firms, we conceptualize the speed of early growth of science-based firms as the time it takes for the assembly (or combined development) of three types of critical resources—a functionally-diverse management team, early fundraising and development of technology. The development of these resources is an unfolding and interrelated process, the causal direction of which is highly ambiguous. We show the variety of paths used by science-based firms to access and develop these critical resources. The picture that emerges is that the various combinations of what we call “assisted” and “unassisted” paths combine to influence the speed of firm growth. We show how a wide range of manifestations of technology development act as signaling devices to attract funding and management, affecting the speed of firm development. We also show how the variety of paths and the speed of development are influenced by the national institutional setting.
Technological change is central in explaining industrial leadership, but the relationships and interactions between scientific research, industrial innovation, and competitiveness are neither clear ...nor straightforward. Public research funding and business strategy dictate to a significant extent the manner in, and extent to which innovation occurs within the economy. This book analyses the role of technological change in the competitiveness of firms and national economies. This includes an examination of: * the roles of R&D spending, and the organisational and technological capabilities of firms in the encouragement of innovation; * the way institutions in various nations differ in the way in which they encourage - or discourage - innovation; and the way in which different industrial sectors provide - or fail to provide - incentives to innovate; and * the ways in which trade, the operation of multinationals and international trade negotiations influence national production and innovation systems . The book combines insights of innovation scholars with those from business history, sociology and economics, in exploring the relation between organizational structures and the process of innovation. It places the analysis of innovation within an international perspective and gives historical and current examples of the interaction between organisational and technological capabilities, industrial and innovation policies and economic performance. Examples are drawn from a range of sectors (services, pharmaceuticals, construction, chemicals) and a range of countries (including the UK and other European countries, the USA, East Asia and Latin America). Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance//toc.html
•Data from an original survey to investigate which types of KIBS firms collaborate with universities.•Science-based KIBS firms (KIBS firms engaged in a science, technology, innovation STI ...organizational mode of leaning) are active collaborators of universities for innovation.•KIBS firms engaged in a doing, using and interacting (DUI) mode of organizational learning and providing highly customized services also actively collaborate with universities for innovation.•KIBS firms co-create knowledge with universities differently than manufacturing firms.•Findings highlight the variety of roles that KIBS firms play in innovation networks with universities.
Drawing on data from an original survey of UK and US publicly traded knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms, we investigate what types of KIBS firms collaborate with universities and consider the collaboration important for their innovation. First, we find that science-based KIBS firms (those engaged in a science, technology, and innovation STI mode of organizational learning), like science-based manufacturing firms, are active collaborators with universities for innovation. This relationship is further enhanced if these firms also provide highly customized services. Second, in contrast to the existing literature suggesting that firms engaged in a doing, using, and interacting (DUI) mode of organizational learning do not regard collaboration with universities as important for their innovation, we find that KIBS firms engaged in a DUI mode of organizational learning and offering highly customized services are active collaborators with universities for innovation, despite the fact that they may not possess highly formalized scientific knowledge. These findings suggest that KIBS firms co-create knowledge with universities differently than manufacturing firms. Moreover, the findings highlight the wide variety of roles that KIBS firms play in innovation networks with universities.
We uncover a “paradox of formal appropriability mechanisms” in the case of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms. Despite evidence that KIBS firms do not typically consider formal ...appropriability mechanisms, such as patents, to be central mechanisms for capturing value from innovation, we show that they are nevertheless important for their innovation collaboration. Drawing on an original survey of publicly-traded UK and US KIBS firms, we find a significant positive association between the importance of innovation collaboration and the importance of formal appropriability mechanisms. We interrogate the evidence for clients, as they are the most important partners for innovation collaboration. We find that the importance of innovation collaboration with clients goes hand-in-hand with the importance of formal appropriability mechanisms, although a negative relation appears when firms assign very high importance to formal appropriability mechanisms. Thus, modest levels of emphasis on formal appropriability mechanisms may prevent conflicts over ownership of jointly developed knowledge assets and knowledge leakages, while also avoiding the possibly negative effects of overly strict controls by legal departments on innovation collaboration. As well as exploring formal appropriability mechanisms, we also investigate the relationship between contractual and strategic appropriability mechanisms and innovation collaboration for KIBS firms.
As drivers of economic growth, entrepreneurial ecosystems are an important focus of research. We propose a new theoretical perspective, in which the formation of entrepreneurial ecosystems can be ...tied the provision of pre-entry capabilities and complementary assets that are generic to participants within a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem but difficult to access to firms outside it. We apply this framework through a study of the formation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem focused on online games in South Korea. Through comparative research, we show that access to pre-entry capabilities was widely available across the online gaming industry, but that Korea was unique during the late 1990s in creating infrastructure policies to provide widespread access to broadband internet, which became an important complementary asset for Korean firms. A focus on mechanisms by which value drivers become available to entrepreneurs within a region is a promising approach to explain the formation of entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Abstract The comparative capitalisms literature has developed an increasingly dynamic approach to conceptualizing capitalism variety, and has suggested mechanisms to explain shifts in institutional ...practices under the surface of formal stability of the institutional context. Less is known, however, about how new entrepreneurial firms engage with institutions to develop organizational arrangements needed to support their innovation activities. Such engagement with institutions can represent sources of heterogeneity within and across national institutional contexts, with incremental changes in practices resulting, in some instances, in major transformations in institutions over time. We draw on a study of fifty-three independent mobile games firms in the USA and Japan and the structures and processes used by these firms to develop innovative activities in their institutional context. Our research advances our understanding of organizational diversity and institutional change in two ways. First, our study identifies two new ‘variants’ of how entrepreneurial firms organize their innovation activities in their institutional context—digital creatives and digital engineers. Second, we characterize the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial firms engage and respond to institutions that support the establishment of these variants—defecting, intensifying, and positioning vis-à-vis large firms.
China's increasing integration into the global pharmaceutical value chain is occurring at a time when big pharma's traditional R&D model has entered a period of crisis, and when China faces ...significant challenges in providing healthcare for its huge and rapidly ageing population. Despite China's ambitions of promoting its own pharmaceutical sector, it is likely to continue to depend for some time on significant contributions from foreign companies. While this situation provides considerable opportunities for big pharma companies to expand their markets in China, they are also hoping that offshoring aspects of their R&D to China may contribute to reconfiguring their current R&D model with its weak record of producing new drugs. Drawing on interviews with a small number of pharma R&D centres in Shanghai, patent analyses and industry reports, we provide insights into both the challenges and the opportunities associated with the early stages of establishing such centres in an emerging region with a rapidly growing market. This paper contributes towards a more nuanced view of the internationalization of R&D in emerging regions.
Drawing on a multiple case study of acquisitions of UK biopharmaceutical firms, we develop an analytical framework that elucidates how key determinants of the knowledge base of science-based firms ...and their combinations through M&As interact and affect post-acquisition investment in the target’s R&D projects. We show that two factors — the complementarity/similarity of the technology, and the complementarity/similarity of the discovery and development capabilities of the target and acquiring firm — interact to produce different outcomes in terms of investment in the acquired firm’s R&D assets and for the local science and technology system.
This article investigates the human resource management practices that underpin a specific model of organizing knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Drawing on data from four countries, it ...examines HR practices in two global IT services firms — EDS and IBM. The market for IT services depends very much on outsourcing and the transfer of IT workers from the client to the IT firm. This has theoretical and empirical implications for how IT firms manage recruitment, skill development and job security. The evidence supports an alternative framework for understanding four key influences on HRM in large specialist KIBS firms: i) inter-organizational relations (tight inter-linkages with client organizations); ii) contract performance conditions (outsourcing contracts); iii) knowledge flows (inter-organizational transfers of highly skilled IT workers); and iv) the economic and institutional context (industrial relations institutions). The article demonstrates that these internal and external conditions generate new tensions and conflicts in the design and implementation of HR practices.
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