Empirical Research of Technology Transfer Process as Organizational Ecology and Inter-organizational Learning

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In the first phase of this research project, we investigated the social system and actual situation of the technology-transfer process. It became clear that business mind is scarce in the case of technology transfer from universities and in the university-based ventures. The ability of the manager in the business side is a key for a success of technology transfer.In the latter phase, the project was divided into two researches, the intra-firm technology transfer and inter-firm technology transfer. As research on the intra-firm technology transfer, "the blue LED lawsuit" was taken up as an example about the evaluation of job invention. We examined actual corporate activity and market transactions from the following management viewpoints ; (1)Monetary value of patent right based on the actual condition of licensing business ; (2)Entrepreneurial rent when the inventors start their business at their own risk ; (3)The resource based theory of a corporate strategy ; (4)The effect of the monetary reward based on motivation theory. When analyzed from the above four viewpoints, the amount of reconciliation which the High Court presented was far appropriate than the amount of money of district court judgment.As research on the inter-firm technology transfer, we focused on the case of the optical disc industry in which Japanese companies took the lead in technology development but lost market share. If product architecture becomes modular type, the technology originated in Japan will quickly transfer to South Korea, Taiwan, and China. However, even in that case, the integral know-how of Japanese companies is encapsulated into parts, materials, and the production equipments. Most of the firms in catch-up countries depend on those know-how encapsulated parts and materials whose architecture is integral. It turned out that product architecture has had strong influence against the speed of the technology transfer between companies.