Frank T. Rothaermel

Abstract: We link the exploration–exploitation framework of organizational learning to a technology venture's strategic alliances and argue that the causal relationship between the venture's alliances and its new product development depends on the type of the alliance. In particular, we propose a product development path beginning with exploration alliances predicting products in development, which in turn predict exploitation alliances, and that concludes with exploitation alliances leading to products on the market. Moreover, we argue that this integrated product development path is moderated negatively by firm size. As a technology venture grows, it tends to withdraw from this product development path to discover, develop, and commercialize promising projects through vertical integration. We test our model on a sample of 325 biotechnology firms that entered 2565 alliances over a 25-year period. We find broad support for the hypothesized product development system and the moderating effect of firm size. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an unusually comprehensive and detailed literature analysis of the stream of research on university entrepreneurship, now encompassing 173 articles published in a variety of academic journals, and inductively derive a framework describing the dynamic process of university entrepreneurship based on a synthesis of the literature.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine interfirm cooperation between incumbents and new entrants as a mechanism for incumbents to adapt to radical technological change through exploitation of complementary assets, and find that incumbents that focus their network strategy on exploiting complementary assets outperform incumbents who focus on exploring the new technology.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify a number of factors that help to explain incumbent performance in markets shaken by a radical technological innovation and identify outliers in any population, and much can be learned from examining this group.

TL;DR: Evidence is found that the antecedents to innovation lie across different levels of analysis and can have compensating or reinforcing effects on firm-level innovative output.