University research-originated patented inventions are both becoming more numerous over time, and of higher “quality” as measured by standard social science metrics. Despite the significance of patented university research, it is difficult to observe the extent to which universities are able to capture the economic value from their patented inventions. …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
While there is broad acknowledgement among strategy scholars that recombining diverse individual-level knowledge benefits firm-level innovation, prior literature has paid less attention to how variance in intra-firm organization may impact the efficacy of the knowledge recombination process. …Read More
Does heightened employer‐friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state‐level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would “inevitably disclose” trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual‐level patenting outcomes. …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 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
We empirically examine the innovation consequences of organizational knowledge brokering, the ability to effectively apply knowledge from one technical domain to innovate in another. We investigate how organizational innovation outcomes vary by founders’ initial mode of venture ideation.…Read More
On Friday 19 and Saturday 20 April, the Mack Center hosted the Wharton Technology and Innovation Conference 2013, organized by Saikat Chaudhuri and Rahul Kapoor. The conference, which brought together a dynamic group of international scholars, featured panels led by Shane Greenstein (Northwestern), Karl Ulrich (Wharton), David Hsu (Wharton), Anil…Read More
Why and how do resources provide sources of competitive advantage? This study sheds new light on this central question of resource-based theory by allowing a single resource—entrepreneurial-firm patents—to play distinctive roles in different competitive arenas. As rights to exclude others, patents serve a well-known role as legal safeguards in product markets.…Read More
How do entrepreneurial alliances shape new venture merger likelihoods and performance? This research is interested in exploring a knowledge mechanism which can cut both ways: as startups develop portfolios of alliance partners, there may be higher incentives for a given counterparty to try to acquire the startup so that it can mitigate the outflow of knowledge to other firms.…Read More
