Exploring intermediary’s capabilities and optimal conditions for global technology transfer partnerships between emerging and developed countries

Abstract

Considerable efforts have attempted to clarify the nature of innovation intermediaries by studying stakeholders, mainly from developed countries, to determine their types, functions, and roles. Although prior studies acknowledge the critical importance these intermediaries represent in successful technology transfer, there is limited evidence focusing on the cross-border inter-organizational perspective, especially involving parties from emerging countries. This dissertation reports which capabilities are essential to an effective demand-driven inter-organizational global technology transfer (GTT) when a business deal is led by an innovation intermediary and involves an emerging-country recipient (ECR) and a developed-country source (DCS). The starting point assumes these two actors are not able to meet each other unless enabled through a technology transfer intermediary (TTI) during the termed networking stage which may progress into a matchmaking stage where both entities may negotiate a GTT partnership. The study performed a Real-time Delphi method which collected opinions from 74 experts from 12 countries and tested a list of 28 critical capabilities that could serve as an input for further empirical analysis. The findings allow pinpointing the differences in expectations from the different GTT stakeholders. The conceptual framework can be also applied to assess a TTI’s performance for a given GTT project in which the demand arises from an emerging-country stakeholder. The final part of the study is occupied with the GTT negotiation phenomena. After synthesizing the conditions that are relevant to the emerging-country party, the ECR

the study pursues to further explore optimal scenarios when assessing to confirm a GTT partnership. Stated preference data were collected from a sample of 147 Mexican new technology-based start-up firm’ CEOs and through a choice-based conjoint analysis (CBCA), an integrated list of GTT conditions was tested. This part of the study contributed to providing the utility value of each condition level and the relative importance of each dimension, which allows calculating the different optimal scenarios. The implications reported differences in the preferred conditions depending on project scale, or individual characteristics, i.e. familiarity with technology transfer projects. This part of the study discussed which conditions are preferred by technology transferees from emerging-country backgrounds (i.e. Mexico) and how TTIs could use a choice modeling technique (CBCA) to strategically manage the matchmaking stage and experimenting with different scenarios to understand and segment the emerging-country parties. The emerging-country focused GTT conditions and optimal scenarios contribute not only by producing inputs for further empirical studies but also in providing a unique approach by applying a technique not commonly used in the field of innovation management, to be able to explore scenarios and strategically segment the counterpart actors. This may allow practitioner TTIs to better deal with the demand-generating party (ECR) and effectively connect its need during the negotiation stage enabling the next level transaction: a potential GTT partnership.