The innovation management research and the entrepreneurship literature have acknowledged the importance of open innovation for the new technology ventures innovativeness and growth. In this study, I examine the association between patent spinoff performance and open innovation during the inventive activity of patents which are used to generate spinoffs form their parent firms. I also distinguish between different sources of open innovation i.e. customers, suppliers and competitors in influencing patent spinoffs’ performance.
A unique dataset of patent entrepreneurship from a European Commission project is used. The survey draws on 115,220 EPO inventors from 23 countries including USA, 20 E.U nations, Japan and Israel (InnoST 2011). 718 new ventures were founded based on 15,706 patents and final sample consist of 118 parent-spinoff firms.
This analysis captures an important unexplored antecedent of technological entrepreneurship performance which is the openness of innovative activity to external sources of knowledge. While open innovation and its implications for creativity and firm performance have been studied at length by scholars of innovation management (e.g., Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Chesbrough, 2003; Laursen and Salter, 2006), to my knowledge the implications of open innovation for patent spinoffs have not been examined yet. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between open innovation and performance of patent spinoffs; and how does the source of open innovation i.e. customers, suppliers, and competitors influence performance?
In patent spinoff literature, no earlier work has directly tested the association between open innovation and spinoffs’ performance. I draw on the idea that organizations adopting an open innovation approach allow their employees to build professional networks and accumulate social capital (Davidsson and Honig, 2003; Stuart and Sorenson, 2005). By favoring the consolidation of social ties with external parties, workplaces enhance the ability of founders to identify and grasp value-creating opportunities (Gompers et al., 2005). At the same time, by leveraging the social capital of their employers, founders find it easier to mobilize resources necessary for spinoff success (Sorensen and Fassiotto, 2011) such as financial and human resources (Aldrich and Auster, 1986; Chow and Fung, 2000). Accordingly, I hypothesize that open innovation is positively associated with patent spinoffs performance.
I will use logistic regression method to investigate the relationship between open innovation and spinoff performance. I expect that open innovation is positively associated with patent spinoffs performance. I will have results by the time of conference presentation. These findings have practical implications for the scholars and the policy makers dealing with the issue of technology based entrepreneurship in order to gain a better understanding of the incentives/obstacles for superior entrepreneurial performance.
Poster_Kapila_Saini_Wharton_Unibo.pdf 