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This chapter presents a framework for evaluating commercialization strategies available to start-up innovators operating in high-technology industries. We consider strategies ranging from head-on competition with incumbent firms to cooperation. Cooperation can manifest in a variety of alliances, including licensing, OEM relationships, R&D contracts, and joint ventures. We then relate the use of these strategies to alliance transaction costs, the need for complementary assets, and the firm’s intellectual property position. This chapter draws heavily on recent research showing that patterns of cooperation and competition vary markedly across industry sectors, with some form of cooperation with incumbents almost assuredly necessary in healthcare/medical technology. We emphasize the endogenous, dynamic nature of firm choices, and we illustrate the major principles with two case studies of start-up innovators commercializing university-based inventions. One company has developed several medical devices and the other electronics hardware and software. We follow the companies over a 10-year period, showing the evolution of strategy from cooperation to competition.

The competence-based management approach has shed light on how firms represent open systems that link assets, strategic logic, and capabilities in order to create new competences. Nonetheless, we find that there are too few empirical studies that illustrate how competences are distributed within an industry. The following case study is based on an in-depth analysis of innovation and standards-formation in industrial automation. Two examples, the standard-setting community PROFIBUS and the field bus-related sensor consortium IO-Link are used to analyze partnership arrangements and competence-distribution patterns.

This study is based on qualitative interviews and it uses patent data to judge competences of a standard-setting community's partner firms. Referring to the empirical case of IO-Link, we show how the integrator firms’ competence-leveraging can be significantly affected by new technology approaches that reason a novel deployment of capabilities. It seems that the deployment of resources depends not only on industry segmentation, but also on the firms’ coordinated agenda concerning innovative, new functionality of a given standard. Our patent analysis also mirrors the variety of knowledge within a standard-setting community. Furthermore, we develop a concept of layered business systems, that is, a terminology of knowledge, organizational, and technology domains. Standard-setting communities bundle complementarity assets, they make their member firms create both proprietary and open technology, and they integrate knowledge across industry boundaries.

This study explores the thematic relationships within the field of sustainability of agri-food chains oriented toward Industry 4.0, focusing on the analysis of scientific production, through research articles and technological output according to patents worldwide. Agri-food Industry 4.0 is an expanding interdisciplinary field in which science and technology interactions are increasingly intensifying with a strong link to sustainable development.

This study has used high impact indexed publications (Web of science) and patents as proxy indicators of innovation, which are transformed into two sets of data, reflecting the scientific and technical backgrounds, respectively. On the one hand, both quantitative and qualitative analysis methodologies were used to examine the scientific papers through descriptive analysis, focused on collaborations networks by authors, institutions, and countries, as well as a content analysis of keywords. On the other hand, the analysis of technical background on patent families shows the temporal evolution of technologies with future challenging trends, text mining, main applicants, and geographical examination.

The results show that in the field of sustainability in agri-food chains oriented to Industry 4.0, most research is in the agricultural field in scientific articles, with high impact in climate-smart agriculture. Patent analysis reveals a marked increase in the patenting rate from 2012 and 2013, coinciding with the start of scientific production in this field of knowledge. In spite of the fact that China is the leader country in this technological field, India shows a significant change. Moreover, India is a country that is currently showing significant progress, both in the field of scientific production and in its categorization as an innovative country due to its growth in patent filings.

This chapter discusses current issues raised by the use of patents in university-industry technology commercialization. After introducing how patent laws operate in the global marketplace, this chapter provides an overview of the U.S. patent system, describing aspects of the process by which patents are obtained and enforced. The focus of the chapter then turns to some of the benefits and costs to academia of the impact of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to capture returns from federally funded research. The chapter identifies some of the challenges created by the expanding scope of subject matter eligible for patent protection and concludes with a discussion of some of the issues and opportunities associated with the strategic licensing and enforcement of patents that may impact invention and innovation in the academy and beyond.

This chapter presents a framework for evaluating commercialization strategies available to start-up innovators operating in high-technology industries. The chapter uses a stream of research relating to three major considerations for commercialization strategies: intellectual property rights’ strength; requisite complementary assets; and licensing/alliance transaction costs. The authors describe the options available to the innovator and explain how the attractiveness of alliances increases with the strength of the innovator's IPR position and the cost of acquiring complementary assets. The four distinct commercialization environments defined by these factors then are related to the likelihood an innovator will commercialize an invention through cooperation or competition. The chapter then applies the framework to five case studies of start-up innovators in a major research university's business incubator.

Although the cottage industry of neoinstitutional research gained its momentum through a conceptual architecture that was centred on a bifurcation of technological/material forces and cultural dynamics, current research in this genre has begun to re-examine the utility of such distinctions. One of the downsides of such a conceptual distinction is that the institutional approach to technology is anachronistic, treating it as an exogenous force. Even though early work by Woodward and others usefully contributed to our understanding of organizations by highlighting how different technologies correlate with various organizational forms, recent scholarship has enhanced our more functional understanding of technology by highlighting processes of coevolution and structuration. In this chapter, we draw on such social constructionist developments in the study of technology to reanimate institutional analysis. More specifically, drawing on the case of the development of nanotube intellectual property, we focus on how technological knowledge production is embedded in community cultures. Our arguments and evidence suggest that there are distinctive community cultures around intensive versus extensive knowledge-generating patents, highlighting how an approach that appreciates the interactive dynamics of technology and culture can yield important insights into the institutional dynamics of technology development.