International Journal of Innovation Management

University patenting has become an important research outcome in the past few decades. There has been an increase in the number of faculty patents and individual scientists listed as inventors on patent applications. The effective allocation of funding to universities is of great concern to policymakers. In this paper, we evaluate whether an increase in government funding for academic scientists enhances the performance of researchers in both scientific publications and academic patents or if this merely increases publications in the academic realm. We provide summary statistics from nanotechnology data in Quebec, compare it with other provinces in Canada, and build econometric models of various publication, patenting and grant databases. The analysis illustrates the strong relationship between funding and publication productivity as well as the citation impact of publications. In the light of research performance in patenting activities of academic researchers, this empirical study finds a strong influence on the number of patents. Moreover, increased funding appears to strengthen the citation impact of patents in Quebec, which affects the citation impact of patenting activities.

Companies nowadays face a myriad of business opportunities as a direct consequence of manifold disruptive technology developments. As a basic characteristic, disruptive technologies lead to a severe shift in value-creation networks giving rise to new market segments. One of the key challenges is to anticipate the business logics within these nascent and formerly unknown markets. Business model patterns promise to tackle this challenge. They can be interpreted as proven business model elements, which reveal valuable insights about pursued business logics. The approach in general helps increasing efficiency in business models design processes, but especially lacks methodological support so far. The paper at hand, therefore presents a methodology for pattern-based business model design simplifying development and analysis of business models for disruptive technologies. The methodology has been validated within several industrial projects.

Innovation is key to the pharma model, from an initial discovery to the final development of a marketable drug. Here, we explore the innovation options in the fiercely contested therapeutic area of Oncology. We studied clinical development of drugs targeting PD-1 and PD-L1 pathway. In this interesting contest, companies seem to be focusing on standalone interventions (exploratory innovation) and combination therapy (exploitative innovation) in clinical development. Merck Sharp and Dohme, having a relatively weaker oncology pipeline seems to take exploratory approach of standalone intervention. However for some indications, MSD seems to harness exploitative innovation approach through combination therapies by collaborating with external partners. AstraZeneca in contrast seems to focus on exploitative approach using its strong oncology pipeline for combination therapies. Our work provides a framework to understand exploratory (standalone) and exploitative (combination therapy) innovation approaches and their relationship to capability, scientific networks and market access for a company entering a fiercely contested pharmaceutical market.

This paper considers a multi-level perspective to analyse the crucial role of individuals and communities outside firms in the localised dynamics of innovation. Through a qualitative study of the communities emerging in co-working spaces (CWSs) in Barcelona, we disentangle the different dynamics of innovation involving community insiders and local actors (firms, citizens and governmental bodies). We argue that CWSs act as intermediaries between creative individuals ("the underground") and innovative firms ("the upper-ground"), contributing to the interaction between co-located actors through the articulation of places, spaces, projects and events. The results lead to suggestions for policies to contribute to the emergence and development of innovation by fostering innovative processes outside firms.

Patent aggregating companies are institutions that aggregate patents for different purposes. From a managerial perspective as well as a theoretical perspective, it is interesting to understand what value such novel business models provide to inventing companies. In this paper we focus on the question how patent holders can use patent aggregating companies as means to capture value from their inventions. Therefore the business models of patent aggregating companies need to be understood. Existing literature lacks a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the patent aggregating companies' business models. The empirical data presented and discussed in this article was collected over a five-year (2009–2014) period in semi-structured interviews with patent aggregating companies' incorporating personnel and in an extensive analysis of secondary data. We conclude our study by identifying four groups of patent aggregating companies based on the values provided to the original patent holders: the guarders, the shielders, the funders and the earners.

Maintaining innovation potential means that ideas, and the people generating those ideas, should be at the firms disposal. Furthermore, the firm should be able to capture value from people's ideas. Losing these people therefore poses risks. Managing these risks is challenging, especially without intra-firm consensus on their role. This study examines how and why perceptions of severity and management of risks related to knowledge leaving and knowledge leaking differ across organisational levels and different firm locations. Depending on what types of differences are present, and why similarities and differences emerge, managers can direct their attention to different control or commitment-enhancing practices to address the risk of harmful knowledge loss and imitation. They should do this in a manner that enables them to maintain the prerequisites for future innovation and a creative work environment, while at the same time allowing global coordination and local adaptation.

Organisations engage in various activities designed to foster effective learning. Three forms of learning with important implications for the innovation process are experiential (whereby firms gain relevant insights through direct experience with patterns of action), vicarious (observation of external activities, with inference and other attributions being employed to reconstruct the underlying processes) and inter-organisational (direct contact with outside entities). This paper examines the influence of these forms of learning throughout the process of technological innovation. Using interview and archival data from 11 innovation projects in biopharmaceuticals and medical devices, I uncover evidence of three distinct learning sequences: (1) intensive-externalising (IE); (2) intensive-internalising (II); and (3) expansive-internalising (EI). The sequences vary both in the breadth of learning forms utilised and in the degree to which resultant knowledge is internalised as subsequent innovations are pursued. These findings offer useful insights into the locus and sources of learning for innovation processes in technologically complex settings.

In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of the lean global start-up (LGS) as a way of emphasising the problems for new technology start-ups when dealing separately with business development, innovation and early internationalisation. The paper has two components — an introductory conceptual part and an empirical part that should be considered as basis for the preliminary validation of the conceptual insights. The research sample includes six firms — three from Canada and three from Denmark. Two different early internationalisation paths have been identified: Lean-to-global (L2G start-ups) and lean-and-global (L&G start-ups). Both types of start-ups were found to have faced significant problems with the complexity, uncertainties and risks of being innovative on a global scale. They have however found ways of addressing these problems by a disciplined knowledge sharing and IP protection strategy and the efficient use of business and supporting and public funding mechanisms. The Danish firms have pivoted around the ways of delivering their value proposition and not around the specific value propositions themselves. The Canadian firms have actively pivoted their value proposition motivated by the degree of innovativeness of their products and the insights from business supporting organisations. The analysis of the results justifies the introduction of the LGS concept and opens the opportunity for future research focusing on the articulation of more practical LGS entrepreneurial frameworks.