University Commercialization Strategies in the Development of Regional Bioclusters*

To analyze university contribution to economic development, the present study examines universities' technology transfer policies and their associated economic development impact. The article examines how a university defines itself as part of a region as well as what activities, if any, do university commercialization strategies in context of their regional environment affect spin‐off activity. Furthermore, this study explores the ways universities contribute to regional economic development by examining existing theories and analyzing universities' relationships with both government and industry in two regions. This study draws from Roberts and Malone's (1996) selectivity–support typology and highlights this article's argument by comparing the commercialization strategies of world‐class universities strategies in the development of regional biotechnology clusters in Massachusetts and in Connecticut. This article investigates the notion of whether universities can differently influence the economic development processes of the while still having successful commercial outcomes. These findings build on previous research ( Clarysse et al., 2005; Degroof and Roberts, 2004; Powers and McDougall, 2005 ), which argues that low support–low selectivity policies may be more suitable to entrepreneurially developed environments, whereas high support–high selectivity policies are more efficient in entrepreneurially underdeveloped environments. Masachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is located in a strong technopole region, whereby many of its support structures for spin‐off formation are provided by the regional infrastructure of the Cambridge–Boston region. In contrast, Yale University, which has an underdeveloped entrepreneurial context, has had to take a more proactive role in providing incubation capabilities to their spin‐off projects. This finding supports a contingent based perspective of academic entrepreneurship, whereby low support–low selectivity policies are more fitted to entrepreneurially developed environments, whereas high support–high selectivity policies are more efficient in entrepreneurially underdeveloped environments.     

Complementarity in R&D Cooperation Strategies

This paper assesses the performance effects of simultaneous engagement in R&D cooperation with different partners (competitors, clients, suppliers, and universities and research institutes). We test whether these different types of R&D cooperation are complements in improving productivity. The results suggest that the joint adoption of cooperation strategies could be either beneficial or detrimental to firm performance, depending on firm size and specific strategy combinations. Customer cooperation helps to increase market acceptance and diffusion of product innovations and enhances the impact of competitor and university cooperation. On the other hand, smaller firms also face diseconomies in pursuing multiple R&D cooperation strategies, which may stem from higher costs and complexity of simultaneously managing multiple partnerships with different innovation objectives.The empirical analysis for this paper has been performed at CEREM/Statistics Netherlands. We thank Bert Diederen of CEREM for his assistance. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies of Statistics Netherlands. We thank two anonymous referees, the editor (Lawrence White), Bonnie Beerkens, Geert Duysters, Katrin Hussinger, and Pierre Mohnen for helpful comments on earlier drafts     

Strategies for Linking Vertical Cooperative R&D to Commercialization in Korea

Since 1982, the government of Korea has actively promoted vertical cooperative R&D programs between government-sponsored research institutes (GRIs) and private firms. A number affirms participated in the programs because cooperative R&D could lower the risk and could contribute to rapid commercialization of many technologies. In this article, Chulwon Lee, Zong-Tae Bae, and Jinjoo Lee examine the effectiveness of participant firms' strategies for commercial utilization of cooperative R&D results, from the viewpoint of technology sourcing at the project level. The data have been obtained from 162 cases of vertical cooperative R&D projects from a diverse group of industries in Korea. Three different commercialization strategies are empirically derived through cluster analysis of the relative usage rates of cooperative R&D and of other supplementary technology acquisition methods. They find that the effectiveness of these strategy clusters varies significantly according to the types of innovation, that is, project-business relatedness. If the project belongs to an existing business area, in-house development augmented cooperative R&D strategy is the most effective. On the other hand, licensing-in supplemented cooperative R&D strategy is the most successful, if the project belongs to a new business area. Findings suggest that firms participating in cooperative R&D projects should try to utilize other supplementary technology acquisition methods in order to achieve commercial utilization of cooperative R&D results.     

Risk and Return on Real Estate: Evidence from Equity REITs

We analyze monthly returns on an equally weighted index of eighteen to twenty-three equity (real property) real estate investment trusts (REITs) that were traded on major stock exchanges over the 1973–87 period. We employ a multifactor Arbitrage Pricing Model using prespecified macroeconomic factors. We also test whether equity REIT returns are related to changes in the discount on closed-end stock funds, which seems plausible given the closed-end nature of REITs.
Three factors, and the percentage change in the discount on closed-end stock funds, consistently drive equity REIT returns: unexpected inflation and changes in the risk and term structures of interest rates. The impacts of these variables on equity REIT returns is around 60% of the impacts on corporate stock returns generally. As expected, the impacts are greater for more heavily levered REITs than for less levered REITs. Real estate, at least as measured by the return performance of equity REITs, is less risky than stocks generally, but does not offer a superior risk-adjusted return and is not a hedge against unexpected inflation.     

Risk and Return within the Single-Family Housing Market

The trade-off between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same trade-off in the single-family housing market. That market is dominated by homeowners, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households. For them the choice about how much housing and what house to buy is a joint consumption-investment decision. Furthermore, owner-occupied housing is by nature a lumpy investment whose risk cannot be completely diversified. Does this consumption-investment link negate the risk-return trade-off within the single-family housing market? Theory suggests the link still holds. This paper supplies empirical evidence in support of that theoretical result.     

Return Risk and Cash Flow Risk with Long-term Riskless Leases in Commercial Real Estate

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of some of the key fundamentals that underlie the risk characteristics of commercial real estate returns. In particular, the relationship between the property's return risk and its cash flow risk is explored. This relationship is important because it is the return risk that should matter most to investors, yet it is the cash flow risk or market risk about which we may have the most objective information and the most intuition. This is because real estate assets are generally unsecuritized and trade too infrequently to observe time series of returns (including appreciation) that could be used to directly study the risk characteristics of the returns. By explicitly incorporating the possibility of cash flows governed by riskless long-term leases, this paper also explores the relationship between lease term and both cash flow risk and return risk.     

The Risk and Return of Commercial Real Estate: A Property Level Analysis

I compare the performance of the index‐based time series approach and the cross‐sectional approach in estimating factor loadings of nontraded assets, and show that the latter likely provides less biased and more efficient estimates. I then use the cross‐sectional approach to estimate the loadings of privately owned commercial real estate on the Fama and French (1993) factors, the Pastor and Stambaugh (2003) liquidity factor, and two bond market factors, using a sample of 14,115 properties in the 1977–2012 period. I find statistically significant loadings, of which the signs seem consistent across property types, but the magnitude varies. Using the time series approach on the same data, I find insignificant loadings on virtually all factors. To investigate the sources of the weak results from the time series approach, I conduct a Monte Carlo simulation in which both approaches are correctly specified and indices can be estimated perfectly. Simulation results suggest that the cross‐sectional approach provides more accurate estimates under reasonable market conditions.     

Development of Trust: A Study of Interfirm Relationships in Vietnam

The radical political and economic reforms sweeping through former socialist countries during the last decade have opened rich opportunities for privately owned businesses to emerge and develop. Since the market institutions and infrastructures in these countries are largely underdeveloped, private firms in transition economies rely extensively on interfirm partnerships. This raises the question of how—in the absence of institutions that legitimate markets, contracts, and private property—managers of new business ventures develop new relationships. This paper addresses this issue through analysis of multiple subcontracting relationships formed at a private garment company in Vietnam. This analysis suggests that firms in transition economies develop interfirm trust in ways that are quite different from their counterparts in more highly developed economies.     

Interfirm cooperation and startup innovation in the biotechnology industry

This paper examines the association between interfirm cooperation and the innovation output of startup firms in the biotechnology industry. A reciprocal association is hypothesized. The results, however, show only that cooperation affects innovation. Several control variables are related to cooperation and innovation, especially the startup's position in the cooperative network.     

Risk and Return in the U.S. Housing Market: A Cross-Sectional Asset-Pricing Approach

This article carries out an asset-pricing analysis of the U.S. metropolitan housing market. We use ZIP code–level housing data to study the cross-sectional role of volatility, price level, stock market risk and idiosyncratic volatility in explaining housing returns. While the related literature tends to focus on the dynamic role of volatility and housing returns within submarkets over time, our risk–return analysis is cross-sectional and covers the national U.S. metropolitan housing market. The study provides a number of important findings on the asset-pricing features of the U.S. housing market. Specifically, we find (i) a positive relation between housing returns and volatility, with returns rising by 2.48% annually for a 10% rise in volatility, (ii) a positive but diminishing price effect on returns and (iii) that stock market risk is priced directionally in the housing market. Our results on the return-volatility-price relation are robust to (i) metropolitan statistical area clustering effects and (ii) differences in socioeconomic characteristics among submarkets related to income, employment rate, managerial employment, owner-occupied housing, gross rent and population density.     

Interfirm cooperation and structural change in the European automobile industry

The past quarter-century has seen the rapid growth of interfirm cooperative arrangements, on a global scale. In the automobile industry, the forms of cooperation have ranged from mergers and acquisitions, with each partner firm retaining its corporate identity and brand name, to very informal strategic partnerships. Because of its past fragmentation, the consolidation of the European industry into “producer groups” has been a main feature of structural change. Arguably, this development and the formation of rent-seeking coalitions within the European Union were of greater significance than companies' purely technology-oriented cooperative ventures. As a result of the industry members' individual and collective rent-seeking, at the national and EU levels respectively, large price disparities among national markets have persisted. Regulatory barriers as well as the noncompetitive behavior of firms continue greatly to influence the automotive sector, despite the Union's ambitious vision of “Europe 92” as the final stage in the development of an open market for products and factors. Whatever benefits automobile producers may have derived from integration, it has done little so far to enhance consumer welfare.     

Interfirm differences in scale economies and the evolution of market shares

Evolutionary and resource‐based theories imply that firms in an industry with different resources and capabilities may differ in critical characteristics of their production functions, such as economies of scale. This paper measures these inter‐firm differences in economies of scale and examines how they affect the subsequent evolution of the market share distribution in the money market mutual fund industry. The findings indicate that fund families with larger marginal benefits to increasing their scale do subsequently gain market share at the expense of their rivals, but that this effect diminishes as the fund family ages, perhaps as a consequence of imitation. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interfirm Relationships in the Supply Chain: The Small Supplier’s View

The need for global market presence, the complexity of new product development, and the emphasis on core competence are making alliances among firms more important, and recent evidence suggests that these issues are affecting small suppliers as well as the large firms that are their customers. This paper studied the relationship orientation (i.e., the perceived importance, of interfirm relations) in a fragmented supplier industry whose single largest customer group is automotive OEMs. The primary objective of the research was the identification of factors that discriminate between firms with high and low relationship orientations. The study found four factors describing benefits and barriers associated with interfirm relationships, and found that firms with a high relationship orientation were smaller and more optimistic about the industry’s ability to support a greater number of firms in the future, and perceived faster technology change than firms with a low relationship orientation.     

Return, Risk and Cost of Equity for Stock S&L Firms: Theory and Empirical Results

This study examines the current deregulated environment for and the financial position of savings and loan associations. It is argued that in a less regulated, more competitive environment managers of savings and loan associations will have to become more proficient in using financial management techniques to assure the survival and the return to profitability of their associations. One aspect of financial management is a more careful estimation of and use of the cost of equity capital, especially for the increasing number of associations that have converted from mutual to stock organizations. Different approaches to the estimation of the cost of equity capital are discussed and monthly stock prices of 35 stock savings and loan associations are used to estimate representative costs of equity capital.     

风险识别及分析在型号外协外包管理中的应用

<正>航天型号研制是一个大型、复杂的系统工程,其项目周期长、规模大、涉及范围广、投资额巨大。由于技术的先进性、系统的复杂性、需求的特殊性使型号在研制周期、在轨寿命期内充满了风险,且它在策划、计划、执行和实施的全过程中都存在着不确定的内、     

Risk and Return to Housing, Tenure Choice and the Value of Housing in an Asset Pricing Context

Homeowners do not diversify their risky home equity because of fixed costs of issuing securities and information costs. An asset pricing model is developed for homeowners with the undiversifiable home equity asset. Homeowner value and house value to diversified landlords are compared, and a tenure choice equation is developed. We demonstrate the existence of a rational expectations equilibrium under appropriate conditions.     

企业财务风险的成因及对策

企业的财务风险存在于生产经营过程中,是客观存在的,企业只有制定制度,采取措施降低风险,而不可能消除风险。本文通过对企业财务风险成因进行分析,探索解决风险的办法。