Untangling the boundaries in technology collaborations: The deviation effects of project autonomy on innovations through collaborations

Untangling the boundaries in technology collaborations: The deviation effects of project autonomy on innovations through collaborations

高田　直樹

Technological innovation, Technology management, Commercialization

2016/9/5

2016 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET)

In line with rising number of collaborations among organizations, many researchers investigated the effects of relational factors (e.g. trust relationship) between parent firms. In contrast with this trend, this paper separately captures management-level (parent firms) and operational-level (projects) in collaborations, and investigates the effects of relationships between these two levels. In this setting, parent firms have responsibility for contract and conflict resolution, and project for R&D activities. The concept of “project autonomy”, which means the extent to authority and freedom of a project to make its own decisions about purpose and procedure about R&D activities, is the indication of one of those relationships. The result of analysis using patent-based measure suggests two points. First, high project autonomy promotes the technological outcome through integration inside projects. Because collaborative projects are composed of members from different organizations, autonomous decisions may set on integration of organizational routines. Second, low project autonomy promotes the integration between projects and own firm, which is needed to commercialize through linking technological outcome with complementary resources. Combining with these two points, it is suggested that these points are not accomplished simultaneously due to project autonomy. High failure rate of technology alliance may be explained from this aspect.