Innovation diffusion, licensing and corporate entrepreneurship - a conceptual review

The diffusion process of technology and innovation has become increasingly complex. In times of great technological leaps of emerging economies, diffusion mechanisms have changed. To cope with this change, this article reviews technology diffusion and patent licensing literature to develop robust theory that allows providing future research directions. Based on the analysis of scholarly work published in top-tier peer-reviewed management journals between 1960 and 2013, the authors find that research strongly lacks the analysis of intra-firm diffusion mechanisms. In this context, the role of corporate entrepreneurship is unclear and the density-dependent growth model, the information cascade model and game theory approaches hardly received attention. The authors build innovation diffusion theory and provide a conceptual overview as a stimulus for future research covering intra-firm and inter-firm diffusion, licensing as a specifically important diffusion mechanism and the role of corporate entrepreneurship in established companies.