Old technology meets new technology: complementarities, similarities, and alliance formation
Old technology meets new technology: complementarities, similarities, and alliance formation
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DOI：
10.1002/smj.634
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发表时间：
2008
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
F. Rothaermel;W. Boeker
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
F. Rothaermel;W. Boeker
在许多经历根本性技术变革的高科技行业中，联盟的形成很常见，老牌企业利用与新进入者的联盟来适应技术变革，而新进入者则受益于老牌企业将新技术商业化的能力。尽管这些联盟很普遍，但考虑到这些公司可能选择的合作伙伴范围，我们对这些公司如何选择与特定公司结盟知之甚少。本研究探讨了导致制药和生物技术公司之间形成联盟的因素。我们重点关注联盟关系作为分析单位，并认为二元的互补性和相似性直接影响联盟的形成。然后，我们引入了一个权变模型，其中互补性和相似性对联盟形成的积极影响受到新技术公司的年龄的调节。我们从理论上关注分析层次之间的交叉点，特别是二元结构和公司层次结构之间的交叉点。我们发现，当生物技术公司较年轻时，制药公司和生物技术公司更有可能基于互补性结成联盟。另一个值得注意的贡献是发现，与细粒度的科学和技术相关指标（如专利交叉引用或专利共同引用）相比，广泛能力的代理在预测联盟形成方面至少同样有效（如果不是更有效）。最后，我们建议未来关于联盟形成的研究需要考虑跨层级的相互作用；例如，二元能力如何与公司层面的因素相互作用，以及或多或少细粒度的组织能力衡量标准的优点和缺点。
Alliance formation is commonplace in many high-technology industries experiencing radical technological change, where established firms use alliances with new entrants to adapt to technological change, while new entrants benefit from the ability of established players to commercialize the new technology. Despite the prevalence of these alliances, we know little about how these firms choose to ally with specific firms given the range of possible partners they may choose from. This study explores factors that lead to alliance formation between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. We focus on the alliance tie as the unit of analysis and argue that dyadic complementarities and similarities directly influence alliance formation. We then introduce a contingency model in which the positive effect of complementarities and similarities on alliance formation is moderated by the age of the new technology firm. We draw theoretical attention to the intersection between levels of analysis, in particular, the intersection between dyadic and firm-level constructs. We find that a pharmaceutical and a biotechnology firm are more likely to enter an alliance based on complementarities when the biotechnology firm is younger. Another noteworthy contribution is the finding that proxies for broad capabilities appear to be at least as, if not more, effective in predicting alliance formation compared to fine-grained science and technology-related indicators, like patent cross citations or patent common citations. We conclude by suggesting that future studies on alliance formation need to take into account interactions across levels; for example, how dyadic capabilities interact with firm-level factors, and the advantages and disadvantages of more or less fine-grained measures of organizational capabilities.