Essays on performance management of public research organizations' technology commercialization: Focusing on technology entrepreneurship

Abstract

This dissertation studies the effect of public research organizations (PROs)’ technology entrepreneurship on the mechanism and performance of technology commercialization. This study consists of two essays. The first essay studies how PROs’ technology entrepreneurship and their relationship with external institutions affect the performance of technology transfer. The second one studies how technology commercialization policies, one of the components of PROs’ technology entrepreneurship at the organizational level, affect the R&D efficiency of companies that received the technology transfer from PROs.The first essay deals with the research question: “Do PROs’ technology entrepreneurship and external relationships always improve performance of technology transfer?” To answer this question, this study developed how to measure PROs’ technology entrepreneurship at the organizational level and individual level. Then, this study investigates the effects of PROs’ technology entrepreneurship at the organizational level and individual level on the performance of technology licensing and spin-off by using 2SLS and negative binominal regression. The results show that the degree of public research organizations-industry collaboration has a negative effect on public research organizations’ spin-off creation but positive effects on their technology license agreements and licensing income. In addition, both organizational- and individual-level technology entrepreneurship positively affect PROs’ technology licensing income and, simultaneously, have a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the degree of PROs-industry collaboration and spin-off creation. Therefore, PROs’ top managements and policy makers should consider these different mechanisms and the double-edged sword effects of external relationships when they formulate strategies or policies for technology commercialization.The second essay deals with the research question: “Is the alignment between PROs' R&D competence and policies really matter for technology transfer?” The ultimate goal of PROs’ technology transfer is to increase R&D efficiency of the companies that received technologies from PROs. However, there are lack of relevant studies on this research question. This essay examines the effects of commercially-oriented R&D competence and technology commercialization policies in PROs on R&D efficiency of companies when their absorptive capacities and innovation hurdles are controlled. PROs’ technology commercialization policies are one of main components of technology entrepreneurship at the organization level. Thus, this essay deals with how the component of PROs’ technology entrepreneurship affect technology recipients’ performance in mechanism of technology transfer. This study uses a three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) to control the companies’ factors affecting R&D efficiency. The three-stage DEA can control environmental factors by using Tobit regression in the second stage to calculate their effects on input slacks. The results show that companies that received technology transfer from PROs that have good alignment between commercially-oriented R&D competence and technology commercialization policies have higher R&D efficiency than companies that do not. On the other hand, the misalignment between PROs' commercially-oriented R&D competence and technology commercialization policies can have negative effects on R&D efficiency of companies that received technology transfer. This result can be attributed to the deterioration of the efficiency of the organization due to the misalignment between the organizational competence and their policies. Consequently, this study discloses that the alignment between technology transferor's commercially-oriented R&D competence and technology commercialization policies is critical to improving the R&D efficiency of companies when the companies acquire technologies from external organizations.This dissertation extends the literature on performance management of PROs’ technology transfer by investigating the effects of technology entrepreneurship. Specifically, the first essay finds the double edge sword effects in technology commercialization by different mechanisms of PROs’ technology entrepreneurship and relationship with industry on technology licensing and spin-off, respectively. The second essay reveals an importance of alignment between PROs’ commercially-oriented R&D competence and technology commercialization policies in technology transfer between PROs and companies.