Strategic technology alliances have received increased attention in the management literature. However, considerably less weight has been given to the study of this phenomenon in different environments and particularly in high velocity environments. This paper analyzes six cases of strategic technology partnerships in the mobile telephone industry. We investigate how, in high velocity environments, firms manage technology partnerships as an integrated element of their technology strategy. Based on the case studies, pointers are identified for the management of relationships in rapidly changing environments. Important pointers include the management of multiple time scales, balancing exploration and exploitation, integrating technology partnering into technology strategy, and managing the balance of continuity and change.
In the present paper, relationships between embeddedness, power, control and innovation are examined in the context ofthe telecommunications sector. It is contended that in a tightly embedded, technology-intensive sector, technological and economic control are closeb intertwined. Consequently, the ability to appropriate economic rents is large& based on technological control. In an examination of the Finnish telecommunications sector, it is concluded that the power of the network operator was traditionally not based as much on value creation as on the control of critical resources. With the move to a network of networks in which access ceases to be a bottleneck, this situation has changed. It can be expected that existing focal networks with a strong power imbalance will be replaced. It is difficult to predict what form this process will take, however, as the pace of technological change is very rapid in the telecommunications sector.
Tone onset and normal tone offset in Nd tasks are formally similar to the S1 and S2 events in a CNV task requiring perceptual discrimination (tone duration) for designated tones. If the Nd thus reflects more than mere stimulus selection, increasing the duration of all tones should lengthen the Nd wave. Eight subjects participated to three Nd tasks, with short tones of 50, 150, and 300 msec, respectively. Mean amplitude difference (Nd) between relevant and distracter tones was measured over consecutive 50-msec time windows from 75 to 370 msec. The Nd was significant at C3, Cz, and C4 from the 125- to 170- to the 275- to 320-msec windows, with a significant tone duration effect only for the 225- to 270-msec time slice, with no sign of extended Nd with longer tones. Although this questions existing views of the Nd, it does not particularly agree with the Nd-as- compressed-CNV hypothesis.
New ventures compete by creating innovative products. Liabilities of newness and inexperience, limited resources, rapid technological obsolescence and constantly changing market conditions often encourage new ventures to license other companies' technologies to complement and augment their internally developed innovations. Building on the knowledge-based view of the firm, we propose that the intensity of new ventures' use of inward licensing reflects the demands of their industries and competitive strategies. The results of an empirical study of 361 US new ventures show that industry characteristics and competitive strategy influence their inward licensing as a means of lowering costs and maintaining strategic flexibility while building their capabilities.
This study examines the antecedents of explorative and exploitative learning of technological knowledge from external corporate ventures. We compare different forms of external corporate venturing, namely corporate venture capital investments, alliances, joint ventures, and acquisitions, as alternative avenues for interorganizational learning. Furthermore, we test the effects of multiple relational characteristics on the type of learning outcomes. Our empirical analysis is based on citations in patents filed by a sample of 110 largest U.S. public information and communications technology companies during the years 1992–2000. We find that corporate venturing mode and technological relatedness have significant effects on the likelihood of explorative learning.
The high failure rate among new business ventures is usually chalked up to the fundamental uncertainty of the process. In actuality, say McGrath and Keil, flawed ways of assessing and managing ventures may account for the disappointing amount of value they generate. Instead of taking the go/no-go approach, whereby a project either advances toward launch or is killed, decision makers should consider a range of alternatives: recycling the venture by aiming it at a new target market; spinning it off to other owners or a joint venture; spinning it in to an established business unit; or salvaging useful elements such as technologies, capabilities, knowledge, and patents. Firms that excel in value extraction, the "value captors," whose practices and mind-set this article explores have created formal processes to systematically mine successes, failures, and everything in between. They know that a venture should be treated like a scientific experiment, in which learning plays a critical role. They are ready to seize new opportunities if a venture falters on its original course. They foster networks to promote cooperation and collaboration between established business leaders and venture teams and involve people from throughout the company in the venture review process. They don't allow financial criteria to dominate the reviews, and they recognize that the best people to launch a business may not be the ones who developed the idea. If your innovation pipeline is dry, your promising projects are being strangled for lack of a speedy payback, or someone else has made a fabulous business out of a slightly altered idea that you abandoned, consider the value captor's path. INSETS: Ten Telltale Signs of a Flawed Venturing Process;The Value Captor's Process;How Texas Instruments Discovered a Promising Business.
In this thesis, I examine the diffusion process for a complex medical technology, the PET scanner, in two different health care systems, one of which is more marketoriented (Switzerland) and the other more centrally managed by a public agency (Quebec). The research draws on institutional and socio-political theories of the diffusion of innovations to examine how institutional contexts affect processes of diffusion. I find that diffusion proceeds more rapidly in Switzerland than in Quebec, but that processes in both jurisdictions are characterized by intense struggles among providers and between providers and public agencies. I show that the institutional environment influences these processes by determining the patterns of material resources and authority available to actors in their struggles to strategically control the technology, and by constituting the discursive resources or institutional logics on which actors may legitimately draw in their struggles to give meaning to the technology in line with their interests and values. This thesis illustrates how institutional structures and meanings manifest themselves in the context of specific decisions within an organizational field, and reveals the ways in which governance structures may be contested and realigned when they conflict with interests that are legitimized by dominant institutional logics. It is argued that this form of contestation and readjustment at the margins constitutes one mechanism by which institutional frameworks are tested, stretched and reproduced or redefined.
