Teece (1986) "Profiting from technological innovation: Implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy

22 important questions on Teece (1986) "Profiting from technological innovation: Implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy

What does this paper attempt to explain?

Why innovating firms often fail to obtain significant economic returns form an innovation, while cusotmers, imitators and other industry participants benefits

Where does a regime of appropriability refer to?

Environmental factors, excluding firm and market structure, that govern the innovators ability to capture the profit generated by the innovation

When are trade secrets a viable alternative to patents?

Where the innovation is embedded in processes
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What affects the ease of imitation?

The degree to which knowledge is tacit or codified

Where can a dichotomy be drawn regarding property rights enviornment?

Between environments in which the appropriability regime is tight and weak

What about weak appropriability regime?

Technology is almost impossible to protect

What is the preparadigmatic stage?

There is no single generally accepted conceptual treatment of the phenomenon. Different firms provide different product innovation, however, non has reached a major acceptance by customers yet

What is the paradigmatic stage?

Begins with a "body of theory" appears to have passed the canons of scientific acceptability. With the agreed standard competition switches its focus away from design towards a focus on process innovation; cost reduction, productivity and learning (economies of scale)

What does the emergence of a dominant paradigm signal?

Scientific maturity and the acceptance of agreed upon "standards" by which what has been reffered to as "normal" scientific research can proceed.

What happens once a dominant design emerges?

Competition shifts to price and away from design. Competitive success then shifts to a whole new set of variables.
  • Scale and learning become much more important
  • Specialized capital gets deployed as incumbent's seek to lower unit costs through exploiting economies of scale and learning.
  • Reduced uncertainty over product design provides an opportunity to amortize specialized long-lived investments.

Which three kinds of complementary assets are there?

  1. Generic assets
  2. Specialized assets
  3. Co-specialized assets

What are generic assets?

General purpose assets which do not need to be tailerd to the innovation in question

What are cospecialized assets?

Those for which there is bilateral dependence

Which three concepts can be related in a way which will shed light on the imitation process, and the distribution of profits between innovator and follower?

  1. Tight appropriability regimes
  2. Weak appropriablility regimes
  • Preparadigmatic phase
  • Paradigmatic phase

What should an innovator do in the preparadigmatic phase?

The innovator must be careful to let the basic design "float" until sufficient evidence has accumulated that a design has been delivered which is likely to become the industry standard. An innovator must begin the design process anew if the product doesn’t fit the market well.

What becomes crucial in the paradigmatic phase?

Prices become unimportant and access to complementary assets becomes critical.

What are the advantages of contractual modes?

  • The innovator will not have to make upfront capital expenditures needed to build or buy the asset in question. This reduces the risks as well as cash requirements.
  • Contracting rather than integrating is likely to be the optimal strategy in a tight appropriability regime and where complementary assets are available in competitive supply.
  • In a partnership knowledge transfer is quick
  • Arm’s length contracting embodies more than a simple buy-sell agreement is becoming so common, and is so multifaceted, that the term strategic partnering has been devised to describe it.

What are the disadvantages of contractual modes?

  • It may be difficult to induce partner to make costly irreversible commitments which depend on the success on the innovation and treat of opportunistic abuse.
  • The innovator must persuade its prospective partner that the risk is a good one. The situation is one open to opportunistic abuse on both sides. The innovator has incentives to overstate the value of the innovation, while the supplier has incentives to “run with the technology” should the innovation be a success.

What is the criticism about contractual modes?

  • There is the risk that the partner won't perform according to the innovator's perception of what the contract requires;
  • There is the added danger that the partner may imitate the innovator's technology and attempt to compete with the innovator.

What are the advantages of integration modes?

  • Possible spillovers, higher synergies
  • Advantage of possibly having already some complementary assets in-house (able to buy/build)
  • Even after the innovation is announced, the innovator might still be able to build or buy complementary capacities at competitive prices if the innovation has iron clad legal protection.

What are the disadvantages of integration modes?

  • Time and cash constraints (fig.9)
  • Distribution and specialized manufacturing competences often become bottlenecks.

What is the criticism about integration modes?

In industries experiencing rapid technological change it is unlikely that a single company has the full range of expertise needed to bring advanced product to market in a timely and cost effective manner.

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