The influence of academic and corporate parent organizations on the successful development of new high-tech ventures

Abstract

This study provides insight in the development and success of corporate, academic and independent new high-tech ventures in the Dutch life science industry. It has done so from a venture’s perspective, a very limited examined view. A theoretical framework is developed from a resource-based view. The framework includes intellectual capital, financial capital, and flexibility of a venture. From the developed theoretical framework a conceptual model is derived from which different hypotheses are formulated. These hypotheses are tested on the Dutch life science industry, a developing high-tech industry with many new ventures. A cross-sectional/longitudinal design by means of statistical methods is applied on the BioPartner database that includes 511 cases during the period 2002-2005.

The results provide a number of interesting insights. Overall, the amount of resources available at any moment in time to a venture should be limited as this forces the venture to focus on profitable sales. Profitable sales require a good process in which the resources of the venture are leveraged to address (new) customer needs, which leads to success. This implies that to force a venture to become successful in terms of gaining profits before realizing large turnovers they should receive no financial support from parent organizations or governmental programs and should have a limited amount of IP. Additionally, the management team plays an important role. The management team should not have a high quality champion as this increases the available financial capital at any moment in time. Furthermore, to improve the ability to commercialize knowledge, and thereby improve the leveraging process, the management team should be diversified and cross-functional. Furthermore, results show that independent ventures are most successful in terms of profit. Unfortunately, the mechanism(s) causing this success is/are not identified yet.