Walking the knowledge tightrope

With “outside knowledge” looking increasingly attractive as a means of growing a business, firms need to be more skilful in identifying how, when and where they collaborate with external knowledge partners

Collaborative Innovation: Creating Opportunities in a Changing World

Today’s business environment is characterised by fast and frequent change, which is often difficult to predict. As a consequence, companies need to continuously invest in the development of new business to remain competitive. However, due to the increasing complexity of the environment, internal development is often not enough, and collaborative innovation is becoming more important. There are three areas that warrant our attention. First, interest among employees and organisations to pursue entrepreneurial initiatives raises questions around the management and support that is needed to foster these initiatives and how to best organise internal corporate venturing. Second, the increasing number of start-ups provides opportunities for existing companies to tap into emerging technologies and business areas through corporate – start-up collaboration. Third, the changing nature of work provides an opportunity for existing organisations to rethink the relationship they have with their employees and to find a way to benefit from the increased flexibility of their own and other’s workers. I will raise a number of research questions in these areas and provide directions for future research in the field

External technology sourcing: The effect of uncertainty on governance mode choice

This study examines the effect of external and relational uncertainty on the governance choice for inter-organizational technology sourcing. We develop a number of hypotheses about the impact of environmental turbulence, technological newness, technological distance and prior cooperation on the choice between different governance modes. Data about external technology sourcing transactions in the pharmaceutical industry do not provide evidence for a continuum from less to more integrated sourcing modes. However, we find that the ranking depends on the type of uncertainty, indicating that firms tackle different types of uncertainty with different governance modes.Open Innovation, Corporate Venture Capital, Mergers and Acquisitions

Open innovation in SMEs: Trends, motives and management challenges

Although evidence for open innovation practices has been provided for large MNEs, they have not yet been analyzed systematically for SMEs. This paper presents the results of a survey among 605 Dutch innovating SMEs. The results show that SMEs are increasingly adapting open innovation practices. Moreover, they indicate a difference in the adaption to open innovation between manufacturing and services firms, and between larger and smaller SMEs. Larger SMEs adapting more quickly and in a more structured and professionalized way to open innovation than smaller ones. The survey furthermore shows that SMEs generally pursue an open innovation strategy to realize market-related objectives such as meeting customer demands, or keeping up with competitors. In addition, the results show that the most important barriers respondents face are related to the organizational and cultural differences when cooperating with other partners. Other serious barriers are administrative burdens, financing and knowledge transfer problems.

Additivity and complementarity in external technology sourcing: The added value of corporate venture capital investments

Innovating firms often invest in a number of different technology projects, in different stages of development, using a wide range of distinct technology sourcing modes, such as strategic alliances, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. Recently, firms have also gained an increasing awareness of the potential benefits of corporate venture capital investments. This paper investigates the particular role of corporate venture capital investments in the technology-sourcing portfolio of firms. More specifically, we focus on the extent to which corporate venture capital investments are additive or complementary to other modes of technology sourcing when explaining the innovative performance of firms. The results indicate that corporate venture capital investments are particularly beneficial for the innovative performance of firms when they are used in combination with other technology sourcing modes

Who is the corporate entrepreneur? Insights from opportunity discovery and creation theory

Recent research has begun to address and even compare nascent entrepreneurship and nascent corporate entrepreneurship. An opportunity based view holds great potential to integrate both streams of research, but also presents challenges in how we define corporate entrepreneurship. We extend (corporate) entrepreneurship literature to the opportunity identification phase by providing a framework to classify different types of corporate entrepreneurship. Through analysis of a large dataset on nascent (corporate) entrepreneurship (PSEDII) we show that these corporate entrepreneurs differ largely from each other in terms of human capital. Prior studies have indicated that independent and corporate entrepreneurs pursue different types of opportunities and utilize different strategies. Our findings from the opportunity identification phase challenge those differences and seem to indicate a difference between the opportunities corporate entrepreneurs identify versus the opportunities they exploit