Commercialization of Technological Innovations: The Effects of Internal Entrepreneurs and Managerial and Cultural Factors on Public–Private Inter-organizational Cooperation

Why do scientists and engineers in government laboratories and private companies cooperate and exchange and commercialize technology? What are the factors that impact the propensity to commercialize and the success of such collaborations? These research questions were explored in the extant literature, but the focus has mainly been on the impacts of incentives that employees of public technology laboratories received from their management. This paper reports the findings from a study of 43 government laboratories and 51 industrial companies in the United States. The study expanded the focus of previous research by considering the set of managerial, economic, cultural, and organizational factors as well as the impacts of internal entrepreneurship — in both the public laboratories and private industry. The study also contributed to the literature on internal entrepreneurship by expanding and empirically testing the integrative concept of intrapreneurship. The results show that internal entrepreneurship of the scientific and technical workforce in both types of organizations is the most powerful predictor of commercialization and technology transfer in the public–private cooperation. Other factors found to impact the success of the commercialization effort are senior management support and a culture that encourages cooperation across organizational boundaries. This paper contributes to the state of knowledge in that it establishes empirically that the incentives most likely to work to improve cooperation between public and private technology organizations are those that create a supportive environment for internal entrepreneurs within these organizations, rather than a basket of the usual incentives designed to foster a specific behavior. These findings also contribute to the making of technology policy in developed countries as well as in the emerging world, where the need to encourage cooperation between public and private technology enterprise is increasingly recognized as a powerful economic and technological foundation for growth and prosperity.