Technology licensing as a market entry strategy: Empirical investigations on licensing exclusivity and licensing duration.

摘要

Technology licensing has been a growing method of market entry (Contractor, 1999) and has been employed as a proactive strategy of market entry (Kotabe, Sahay, and Aulakh, 1996). Although there is continuous research on technology licensing, there remain many gaps in the literature. This dissertation attempts to fill in two gaps---licensing exclusivity and licensing duration---and thus consists of two studies.;While more than one-third of inter-organizational agreements for technology licensing include some form of exclusivity rights (Anand & Khanna, 2000), much of the literature has focused only on issues regarding incidence, timing and compensation in licensing agreements. In the first study, we examined the dispersion of technology through the lens of exclusivity rights granted in inter-organizational licensing. We enhanced our knowledge about licensing exclusivity by using a synthesis of transaction cost economics and the resource-based view. We then conducted an internet survey within the Licensing Executive Society to test the hypotheses developed in this first study. We found that technology turbulence and substitutive threats were negatively related to licensing exclusivity; while the radicalness of innovation, core technology, asset specificity in the licensing relationship, and the level of intellectual property (IP) protection are positively related to licensing exclusivity.;Drawing on real options reasoning, we viewed licensing as a real option in the second study and addressed licensing duration as a real option holding period. A model was built to examine the determinants of the holding period and the moderating effects on the determining effect. We conducted an empirical study, the results of which showed that technology turbulence, market uncertainty, and preemptive threat are negatively related to holding period, while irreversibility is positively related to holding period. This second study also found a moderation effect and a mediation effect. Specifically, preemptive threat and technology turbulence interact in such a way that under high preemptive threat, the effect of technology turbulence on licensing duration becomes stronger; technology innovativeness affects holding period through the perceived preemptive threat, or, preemptive threat mediates the relationship between technology innovativeness and holding period.