Untangling the boundaries in technology collaborations: The deviation effects of “project autonomy” on innovations through collaborations

In line with rising number of collaborations among organizations, many researchers investigated the effects of relational factors (e.g. trust relationship) between parent firms. In contrast with this trend, this paper separately captures management-level (parent firms) and operational-level (projects) in collaborations, and investigates the effects of relationships between these two levels. In this setting, parent firms have responsibility for contract and conflict resolution, and project for R&D activities. The concept of “project autonomy”, which means the extent to authority and freedom of a project to make its own decisions about purpose and procedure about R&D activities, is the indication of one of those relationships. The result of analysis using patent-based measure suggests two points. First, high project autonomy promotes the technological outcome through integration inside projects. Because collaborative projects are composed of members from different organizations, autonomous decisions may set on integration of organizational routines. Second, low project autonomy promotes the integration between projects and own firm, which is needed to commercialize through linking technological outcome with complementary resources. Combining with these two points, it is suggested that these points are not accomplished simultaneously due to project autonomy. High failure rate of technology alliance may be explained from this aspect.

I. Introduction

The objective of this study is to reveal the processes and success factors of innovations through joint R&D or inter-organizational collaboration. In particular, this study primarily considers the commercialization aspect in the innovation process and focuses on the effect of the relationships between the management level (parent firms) and operational level (projects) on the technological performance and commercialization of those technologies.