Three Essays on Product Form Choice

Abstract

Innovators and high-technology entrepreneurs have three principal options for transforming their innovations into viable business models and deriving value from their innovations. They may: market intellectual know-how (via licensing and/or proof-of-concept), market intermediate products (i.e., sell components/sub-systems), or market end-products (i.e., sell complete systems/solutions). In this dissertation, I aim to contribute to the organizational design and marketing strategy literature with three separate essays that study these fundamental strategy alternatives, which are called "product form choice". In the first essay, I explore product form choices in the context of early-stage and established firms engaged in new product development projects, and generate a theoretical framework that shows (a) how technology, market, and enterprise-resource related factors systematically impact this choice, and (b) how the enterprise coordinates with other actors in its "eco-system" to design, produce, and market effective products/solutions based on the core innovation. The other two essays use two different methodologies and contexts to systematically test some key refutable predictions from the framework developed in Essay 1. In particular, in the second essay, I use simulated experimental scenarios and ordered-choice models to investigate explore product form choices in the context of early-stage ventures seeking angel investor funding to examine the effect of technology, marketing, and firm-level factors on product form decisions. In the third essay, I use primary survey data obtained from executives from firms selling industrial equipment in four industry sectors to study how coordination and safeguarding motives, in conjunction with a firm's unique set of product development resources impact their product form decision.