Alliance type,alliance experience and alliance management capability in high-technology ventures

We investigate a high-technology venture's alliance management capability. Thus, we develop a model that links differential demands of alliance type and the benefits of alliance experience to an observable outcome from a firm's alliance management capability. We test our model on a sample of 2226 R&D alliances entered into by 325 global biotechnology firms. We find that alliance type and alliance experience moderate the relationship between a high-technology venture's R&D alliances and its new product development. These results provide empirical evidence for the existence of an alliance management capability and its heterogeneous distribution across firms.     

When do domestic alliances help ventures abroad? Direct and moderating effects from a learning perspective

While the importance of strategic alliances for new venture internationalization is well acknowledged, the effect of domestic partners remains less understood. Building on organizational learning theory's vicarious learning arguments, we suggest that internationally experienced domestic partners positively influence new ventures' international intensity. Moreover, acknowledging that ventures may have multiple learning sources, we argue that the effect is more pronounced when substituting for the lack of new ventures' top management teams' international experience, or when complementing the insights about foreign markets received from foreign alliance partners. The analysis of 194 publicly held new ventures largely supports our hypotheses.     

An examination of opportunistic action within research alliances: Evidence from the biotechnology industry

Like a photographer trying to take a perfect picture, an entrepreneur trying to increase the odds of survival must learn very quickly that focus is everything. And what demands an entrepreneur’s immediate focus is the development of new products. Entrepreneurial ventures depend on the rapid creation of new products to gain access to early cash flows, create legitimacy, grab early market share, and increase their odds of survival (Schoonhoven, Eisenhardt, and Lymman 1990). However, the increasing costs and complexity of new product development are making it difficult for entrepreneurial ventures to contain the assets needed for successful R&D within their boundaries, forcing them to reach beyond their borders to access resources. Barley et al. (1992) document the use of more than 900 contractual research agreements within the biotechnology industry alone. Recent research has also found a positive relationship between the use of alliances in the R&D process and the rate of new product development Deeds and Hill 1996, Shan, Walker, and Kogut 1994.This particular study focuses on the use of relational contracts in the R&D process and extends the prior work on relational contracts to create an explanatory model of the deterrents to opportunism within a relational contract. The article begins with a discussion of the traditional modes of deterring opportunism and of modes of deterring opportunism based on the development of a strong cross-boundary relationship. From this discussion, hypotheses are derived that relate certain characteristics of the alliance (frequency of communication, strength of contractual deterrents, hostage investments, age of the relationship, etc.) to the level of opportunism within the relationship. These hypotheses are then tested on a sample of 109 research alliances in the biotechnology industry.We found significant evidence that a strong relationship between the partners serves as a much more effective deterrent to opportunistic action than the creation of hostage investments or contingent claims contracts. In particular, the results for frequency of communication and the background of the firm highlight the importance of the top management team’s understanding and involvement in the management of research alliances. The strong results for background congruence indicates the importance of shared expectations and understandings between the partners.The strong empirical results for the hypothesized U-shaped relationship between age and opportunism provide support for the existence of both a honeymoon period in the relationship and a liability of adolescence among research alliances. The data also suggest that the honeymoon period for an alliance will last about 4.6 years. We also find that the honeymoon period for alliances that are of little importance to the future of the firm is only 4.1 years, and in our sample of alliances that were important to the future of the firm, the honeymoon period extended from 4.6 years to 6.1 years.     

Multilateral alliances and innovation output: The importance of equity and technological scope

The formation of R&D alliances has become an increasingly popular way to achieve improved innovation outcomes. However, R&D alliances face high failure rates due to the dual nature, cooperation and competition, of what can be a very challenging inter-firm relationship, a problem that is compounded when an alliance involves more than two partners. As such, it is important to understand the mechanisms that encourage cooperation in multilateral alliances to help firms achieve desired innovation outcomes. In this study, we hypothesize two such mechanisms: equity governance structure and multi-technology scope. We test our hypotheses using panel data from the pharmaceutical industry spanning 15 years. Our results support the idea that equity governance and having a multiple technology scope are positively related to innovation outcomes in multilateral alliances.     

Using R&D cooperative arrangements to leverage managerial experience: A study of technology-intensive new ventures

During the past decade, increasing attention has been given to the widespread use of research and development (R&D) strategic alliances and cooperative interorganizational relationships. This research has addressed a variety of inter-firm relationships ranging from joint ventures to informal networking. However, most of this literature is based on research involving large established firms. More recently, researchers have recognized that small firms or new ventures are also adopting cooperative R&D strategies with increasing frequency. A variety of reasons for the increasing use of R&D cooperative arrangements in new ventures has been offered, including the need to complement a new venture's existing internal resources, the need to quickly gain the technical capabilities to compete in rapidly changing markets, and the desire to minimize the fixed costs associated with acquiring capital assets.This paper reports the results of a study of new high-technology ventures that examined the relationship between performance, the experience of a venture's management team, and its use of R&D cooperative arrangements. The central proposition of this research was that the effectiveness of R&D cooperative activities is associated with the level of combined expertise possessed by the new venture's management team. Specifically, it was anticipated that new ventures with management teams possessing more experience with the industry and/or with similar technologies would be better able to successfully engage in R&D cooperative activities.The primary data analysis technique was moderated regression. The data was collected from Security and Exchange Commission initial public offering registration statements and other archival documents filed by 210 new ventures in three high-technology manufacturing industries.The results of the regression analysis revealed that sales growth was associated with the use of R&D cooperative arrangements. More important, the results also indicated that this relationship was positive when the new venture's management team was relatively more familiar with the industry, markets, and/or with similar technologies. In other words, our results indicate that the relatively more experienced managers were more proficient at using R&D cooperative activities to strategically position their respective firms vis-à-vis their less experienced counterparts. Evidently, these managers were better able to identify the risks and benefits of engaging in such cooperative activities. Additionally, we provide preliminary evidence that the greater knowledge possessed by the management teams may have allowed the new ventures to reduce the costs associated with R&D market transactions.These findings are important because they suggest that prior managerial experience in similar industries and/or with similar technologies is an important prerequisite for the successful use of R&D cooperative arrangements by new high-technology ventures. Management's knowledge of customer needs, product characteristics, and/or the specific idiosyncracies of the industry and/or technology seems to significantly enhance a new technology-intensive venture's ability to effectively engage in R&D cooperative activities.     

Functional and contextual dimensions of INVs’ alliance partner selection

Prior research on the selection of international alliance partners calls for investigation of the potential specificity of selection criteria for evaluating partners for alliances with different objectives or functions. The present study responds to this need and contributes to the development of the field of international entrepreneurship by examining the relation between the alliance function and the criteria chosen. We studied three alliance functions: R&D, production, and marketing. Second, for each alliance function, we analyzed the criteria selected within two contexts: developing countries and those that consider emerging markets in their partner choice set. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 25 executives from international new ventures (INVs) in two major North American biotechnology clusters, representing 239 alliances; 65.7 % of these were signed with international partners. Results indicate that, aside from compatibility/complementarity of resources (R&D and production alliances), all criteria used within a single function are unique to that function. Furthermore, these criteria differ somewhat when the potential partners considered by a firm include those from both emerging and developed markets, compared with firms that limit potential partners to those in developed market contexts. Finally, the study reveals that respondent firms integrate country, industry, and market attractiveness factors with partner selection criteria for marketing alliances. This suggests that, for many firms, market choice and partner selection are not successive steps. The study’s originality lies in its focus on the relationship between alliance function and partner selection criteria used by INVs as well as within different contexts.     

Technology strategy and new venture performance: A study of corporate-sponsored and independent biotechnology ventures

New ventures, companies eight years or younger, play a major role in the development of an emerging, high-technology industry. Corporate-sponsored new ventures (those supported by an established corporation) and independent ventures (those founded by independent entrepreneurs) frequently battle for industry leadership and financial success. Whereas both venture types use technology to achieve financial and market success, little is known about the differences in their technology strategies.Technology strategy is the plan that guides a new venture's decisions on the development and use of technological capabilities. This strategy covers six major areas. The first is selecting the pioneering posture, where a venture decides whether or not be among the industry's first companies to introduce new products (technologies) to the market. The second is determining the number of products to be introduced to the market. The third is choosing the extent of a venture's use of internal and external R&D sources. Internal sources usually refer to in-house R&D activities. External sources may include purchasing or licensing of technology from other companies, or joining strategic alliances to acquire that technology. The fourth is deciding the level of R&D spending. The fifth is selecting the combination (portfolio) of applied and basic research projects. Whereas basic R&D advances science, applied R&D leads to new products and technologies. The sixth, and final, dimension is the venture's use of patenting to protect any competitive advantages it might gain from its R&D activities.This article reports the results of a study that explored the differences in the technology strategies and performance of corporate and independent ventures. The biotechnology industry was chosen to test the study's hypotheses, using 112 ventures.Seven of the study's hypotheses focused on the potential variations in technology strategy between corporate and independent ventures. Independent ventures (IVs) were expected to surpass corporate ventures (CVs) in pioneering new products (technologies), using internal R&D, and emphasizing applied R&D. CVs were expected to surpass IVs in introducing new products, using external R&D sources, spending on R&D, and patenting. The study's remaining three hypotheses covered possible variations in new venture performance (NVP) and their sources.The results showed that IVs focused more on pioneering, pursued a more applied R&D portfolio, and emphasized internal R&D more than CVs. CVs utilized external technology sources, spent more heavily on R&D, stressed basic R&D, and used patenting more intensively than IVs. These results were consistent with the hypotheses. However, contrary to expectations, there were no significant differences between CVs and IVs in the frequency of new product introductions, probably because most ventures were at the invention, rather than the commercialization, stage.The results on the NVP of CVs and IVs were counter to expectations. IVs outperformed CVs, probably because of the high motivation of the IV owners who reaped the rewards of growth and profitability. Also, whereas CVs may have greater access to the resources of their sponsors, political conflicts and rigid corporate controls might have reduced their ability to achieve competitive advantages.The results also indicated that CVs and IVs appeared to gain competitive advantages from different technological choices. Pioneering, a focus on applied R&D, and extensive use of the internal R&D sources were also positively associated with the performance of IVs. Heavy R&D spending, the use of both internal and external R&D sources, frequent product introductions, and patenting were positively associated with the performance of CVs. Finding that technology strategies significantly impacted NVP should encourage executives to consider pursuing a formal technology strategy. Likewise, the finding that different dimensions of technology strategy influenced the performance of CVs and IVs in different ways has practical implications. CV managers can learn from their higher performing IV rivals. Also, because established companies frequently acquire IVs, information about their technology strategies can be valuable in assimilating the acquired ventures. Overall, the results show that technology strategy is an important factor in enhancing new venture performance.     

The battleship strategy: The complementing role of born globals in MNC’s new opportunity creation

In the high-tech industries, new innovations affect a multinational company’s (MNC’s) competitive advantage. This article empirically explores why and how MNCs complement their in-house R&D by forming strategic alliance constellations with small, innovative born globals. We focus on loose, non-equity opportunity-seeking co-opetitive relationships. We call this approach the battleship strategy. The critical elements of an MNC’s battleship strategy include an open innovation commercialization strategy and creation of forums for facilitating open innovation and capturing ideas generated externally. Hence, we suggest that MNCs may externalize some of their innovation activities while gaining a competitive advantage through access to open innovation. This article contributes in several ways to earlier research focusing on the strategic alliances and networks formed between MNCs and born globals by examining the relationship from an MNC’s perspective.     

Technology strategy and software new ventures' performance: Exploring the moderating effect of the competitive environment

Technology strategy (TS) is one of the most important aspects of any firm's strategic posture especially in dynamic environments such as the computer software industry. Not only do new ventures face the pressures that accompany all young companies (e.g., shortages of capital), but they also have to keep up with a rapid rate of technological change. Consequently TS, the sum of a firm's choices on how to develop and exploit its technological resources, can profoundly affect a venture's performance and survival.This empirical study examines the relationships between TS and new venture performance (NVP). By focusing on TS variables and analyzing their performance outcomes, the study offers insights into the factors that can influence the success of new ventures in a fast-paced environment. This study also examines key environmental moderators, those external environmental forces, which can significantly impact the strength or direction of the relationship between a firm's TS and NVP.The study examines five TSs that can enhance NPV. The first is radicality, which means developing and introducing new products ahead of competitors. The second is the intensity of product upgrades, which refers to a venture's commitment to introducing more refinements and extensions of its products than its competition. The third is the level of R&D spending, which indicates a venture's strong investment in internal research and development activities. The fourth is the use of external technology sources (e.g., strategic alliances and licenses) to augment a firm's own R&D efforts. The final dimension is the use of     

Corporate motivation and performance in R&D alliances

In the face of the global challenges of rapid transitions in technologies and markets, R&D activity has become one of the main ways for companies to engage in innovation. In addition, minimizing transaction cost is no longer sufficient to ensure a company's survival; therefore, companies must investigate and acquire resources to facilitate innovation within the organization. This study investigates corporate motivation and the performance of R&D alliances among machinery manufacturers in Taiwan. To explore the relationships between motivation and performance, this study adopts two distinct but complementary perspectives on R&D alliances: transaction-cost economics (TCE) and resource-based theory (RBT). This study includes the administration of a survey to explore the issues of motivation of companies participating in R&D alliances, types of governance structure in alliances, relationships between governance structure and performance, and relationships between motivation and performance of an R&D alliance in Taiwan's machinery industry (the TMI). The results in this study assert that corporate motivation as derived from both TCE and RBT perspectives has a significant positive relationship with the performance of R&D alliances; however, the other moderating variables, such as types of governance structure and corporate attributes, do not have a significant impact on the performance of R&D alliances in the TMI.     

The impact of early imprinting on the evolution of new venture networks

Given the argued importance of networks to new ventures, this paper is intended to fill a noted gap in the literature pertaining to the factors that influence the evolution of new ventures' alliance networks. Drawing on the imprinting literature, we propose that one has to look beyond the first partner per se, and instead focus on the extant relationships the initial partner has with other firms. More specifically, we argue and find that the network size and centrality of a new venture's initial alliance partner influence the subsequent size of the new venture's network.     

The effects of absorptive capacity,knowledge sourcing strategy,and alliance forms on firm performance

This paper explores the relationship between absorptive capacity, knowledge sourcing strategy, alliance forms, and firm performance. Based on the literature, the concept of a knowledge sourcing strategy in alliance contexts is proposed, which can be categorised into two types: a knowledge internalisation strategy and a knowledge access strategy. From an organisational learning perspective, it is argued that a firm's absorptive capacity has a positive influence on a knowledge internalisation strategy, and accordingly a firm's choices of alliance forms are also influenced. R&D performance is also included in the theoretical model in order to generate further managerial implications. Instead of using conventional regression methods, structural equation modelling (SEM) is adopted to conduct path analysis, as SEM is well suited in verifying multiple-dependent models. The arguments advanced are supported by empirical analysis of a sample of 148 alliances.     

Strategic alliances by financial services firms

We examine a sample of strategic alliances made by financial services firms during 1986 to 2003. The market reacts positively to the announcements of alliances and seems to incorporate the information about the value of alliances at the time of alliance announcements. We find no evidence of abnormal stock performance after announcements. Our results also suggest that strategic alliances usually are used as a final form of cooperation rather than as a first step towards closer cooperation between firms. For instance, only about 5% of alliances are followed with joint ventures or mergers of partner firms. Nevertheless, strategic alliance firms are more likely to form joint ventures or merge than randomly selected and matched firms. Furthermore, the market reacts more favorably to the alliance announcements by firms that are subsequently acquired by the alliance partners.     

Opportunism in the R&D alliances of SMES: The roles of the institutional environment and SME size

SME leaders with R&D alliances face significant challenges in balancing the need for resource acquisition in the innovation process and the potential for opportunistic behavior by alliance partners. This study, utilizing a sample of 456 SMEs from eight countries, examines how the resource capacity of the SME and the institutional environment are related to the perceptions that owners and managers have about the opportunistic behavior of alliance partners. The results suggest that firm size moderates the relationship between the technological munificence and the predominant culture of the domestic market of the SME and concerns about the opportunistic behavior of an SME alliance partner.     

The evolution of interorganizational relationships in emerging ventures: An ethnographic study within the new product development process

Emerging ventures rarely have the resources they need, which often force them to reach beyond their boundaries to access these resources. While the field has acknowledged how critical external relationships are in the emergence process, we lack an understanding of how these relationships evolve. Drawing on fourteen longitudinal case studies, this article begins to fill that gap by examining how emerging ventures use interorganizational relationships to discover, develop, and commercialize new products. We found that emerging ventures tended to establish outsourcing relationships early and that many outsourcing relationships progressed into alliances. This suggests that these early relationships are dynamic, evolve through the emergence process, and may be critical to the successful emergence of a venture. We also discovered that many entrepreneurs developed strong socioemotional bonds with their alliance partners. Unexpectedly, our study revealed that in many cases these socioemotional bonds clouded the entrepreneur's judgment of the partner's abilities and led to problems that threatened the venture's survival.     

Globalization of R&D and China: An Introduction

In this introduction, we discuss the recent changes in multinational corporations' (MNCs) research and development (R&D) strategies and China's rising role in this new development. Significant changes include: 1) More and more corporations have started overseas R & D operations; 2) the missions of many overseas R&D facilities have shifted from the traditional supplementing and supporting roles to become critical and strategic components of MNCs' global R&D networks; and 3) MNC overseas R&D operations have expanded their geographic reach to carefully selected developing countries. China has benefited from such changes and has become one major attraction for such R&D facilities due to its rich endowment of low-cost and well- trained scientists and engineers as well as its fast growing domestic market and burgeoning foreign investment in manufacturing. The explosion of foreign R&D investment has also been accompanied by the rapid growth of China's domestic investment in R&D. The growth in both domestic and foreign investment in R&D implies that China will improve its position in global economic and technological competition. However, it is unclear to the rest of the world about the implications of China's rising R&D and whether or not China can capture the value from the presence of foreign R&D centres. We conclude that issues related to China's science and technology development in general and foreign R&D in China in particular warrant more research in the future.     

The nature and origins of social venture mission: An exploratory study of political ideology and moral foundations

Although organizational mission is central to social venturing, little is known about the nature and origins of social ventures' missions. In particular, the field lacks a framework for understanding the moral content of nascent ventures' “prosocial” missions that rely on quite different—and potentially conflicting—moral values. We engage in an exploratory study, drawing on moral foundations theory and upper echelons theory to develop framing questions related to the moral discourse in social venture missions and the role of founders' political ideology in relation to this moral discourse. We construct a novel dataset using computer-aided text analysis on the mission statements of over 50,000 nascent nonprofit ventures in the United States, supplemented by voter registration data from 17 states and Washington, D.C. Our findings reveal rich nuance in the moral discourse found in organizations' mission statements. Furthermore, founding teams' political ideologies are strongly associated with the moral discourse in their social ventures' stated missions—and in ways that differ intriguingly from findings in moral psychology at the individual level. We draw on these new insights to develop a roadmap for future research on organizational mission in relation to social venturing, moral markets, mission drift, and political ideology.     

The roles of R&;D in new firm growth

Innovative start-ups are an important driver of economic growth. This article presents empirical evidence on the effects of research and development (R&D) on new product development, interfirm alliances and employment growth during the early life course of firms. We use a dataset that contains a sample of new firms that is representative of the whole population of start-ups. This dataset covers the first 6 years of the life course of firms. It is revealed that R&D plays several roles during the early life course of high-tech as well as high-growth firms. The effect of initial R&D on high-tech firm growth is through increasing levels of interfirm alliances in the first post-entry years. R&D efforts enable the exploitation of external knowledge. Initial R&D also stimulates new product development later on in the life course of high-tech firms, but this does not seem to affect firm growth. R&D does not affect the growth rate of new low-tech firms, which seem to be driven mainly by the growth ambitions of the founding entrepreneur. The results show that R&D matters for a limited but important set of new high-tech and high-growth firms, which are key in innovation and entrepreneurship policies.

Technological Resource Leveraging and the Internationalisation of New Ventures

A growing body of research on international entrepreneurship suggests that new ventures have succeeded in entering international markets by creatively exploiting their tangible and intangible technological resources. Using the resource-based view of the firm, this paper explores the impact of leveraging selected tangible and intangible technological resources on the speed and degree of sales internationalisation among US software new ventures. Even though R&D investments are not significant predictors of the speed or degree of sales internationalisation, technological networks and technological reputations are. The interactions of networks and reputation with R&D spending are also positively and significantly associated with higher sales internationalisation. Technological networks also interact positively with R&D spending to expedite sales internationalisation, but the interaction of these investments with technological reputations is not significant. The results show that intangible technological resources play an important role in the internationalisation of software new ventures' sales. The implications of the findings for future international entrepreneurship research are discussed.