Few studies have examined the impact of divestitures on the innovation performance of firms. In particular, little attention has been paid into how the divestiture of firms’ non-core businesses could influence the innovation outcomes of their core businesses. …Read More
We construct a sample of approximately 20,000 “twin” scientific articles, which allows us to hold constant differences in the nature of the advance and more precisely examine characteristics that predict startup commercialization.…Read More
Four student teams wowed the judges at the 2020 Y-Prize Competition and took home prize money to invest in their ideas about how to repair and harvest energy from metal.…Read More
Clinicians and scientists explored the process of evaluating and creating business opportunities.…Read More
Adding to the literature on the recognition and spread of ideas, and alongside the bias against novelty view documented in prior research, we introduce the perspective that articles compete for the attention of researchers who might build upon them. …Read More
When are scientific advances translated into commercial products via startup formation? Although prior literature has offered several categories of answers, the commercial potential of a scientific advance is generally unobserved and potentially confounding. …Read More
The Penn Wharton Commercialization Workshop offers researchers a three-day innovation primer to help them turn their ideas into successful ventures.…Read More
The emergence of biotech has resulted in a rich ecosystem of different types of actors contributing to the technological advance. Despite the enormous promise of biotech-based therapeutics, there is substantial uncertainty regarding when scientific discoveries will emerge, whether these discoveries will achieve clinical success, and how commercialized treatments will create value. …Read More
University-based research is an important generator of fundamental scientific knowledge in society, and may also be the basis for valuable commercial activity. We aim to update and extend our knowledge of the processes of translating academic discoveries and inventions by studying the administrative data from Penn Center for Innovation (PCI). …Read More
The translation of invention to innovation is a topic that has received significant research attention in recent times. Scholars have recognized that our understanding of the factors that shape whether and when innovative technologies arise and transform industries cannot be complete without comprehending how scientific or technological discovery evolves into commercial adoption. …Read More
The second annual Penn Wharton Commercialization Workshop brought together researchers from across the university to learn about launching a new venture based on their work.…Read More
We explore the relationship between competition among downstream commercializing firms (e.g. incumbent pharmaceutical firms) and upstream innovative firms (e.g. startup biotechnology firms). We find that in an alliance regime, common in high technology industries, competition among the commercializing firms can reduce the productivity of the innovators, resulting in a net loss of societal welfare (e.g. less drugs invented and brought to market). …Read More
Getting an innovative technology to market can be a challenge for an established company when the technology runs counter to the company’s current business model. But the right organizational design can help.…Read More
The Penn Wharton Commercialization Workshop brought together 33 researchers from across the university to learn how to bring their ideas to market.…Read More
The road to successful commercialization is a steep and difficult one — a fact which entrepreneurs know all too well. But like hikers who use a zig-zag trail to ease their ascent up a mountain, entrepreneurs may be able to more effectively reach their goals by taking an indirect route.…Read More
We present a synthetic framework in which a technology entrepreneur employs a dynamic
commercialization strategy to overcome obstacles to the adoption of their ideal strategy. Whereas prior work portrays the choice of whether to license a new technology or to self-commercialize as a single, static decision, we suggest that when entrepreneurs encounter obstacles to their ideal strategy they can nevertheless achieve it by temporarily adopting a non-ideal strategy.…Read More
