Formulating technology commercialization strategies
Description
Even if young organizations succeed in acquiring the specialized talent necessary to further develop a recently-discovered technology, they may face an uncertain path in commercializing the original invention. Initial conceptions of what might constitute a useful application of the technology may need to be discarded as consumer preferences become socially constructed and more fully understood. While nascent firms are less subject to inertia than their senior corporate siblings and thus may be ideally poised to explore various avenues, they generally lack the resources to do so. External investors promise to solve the resource problem but may introduce constraints of their own. A first paper explores the possibility that the common venture capital practice of doling out funds in small increments—rather than all at once—may limit the ability of young organizations to adapt their strategy. Using a dataset chronicling technology commercialization approaches and funding events in the worldwide automatic speech recognition industry from 1952-2006, I investigate whether the formal constraint of investment “staging” reduces strategy adaptation.