New working paper: "Knowledge Diversity in the Emerging Global Bio-Nano Sector"

My co-authors and I have a new working paper out on SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1672506


Knowledge Diversity in the Emerging Global Bio-Nano Sector

Elicia Maine 

Management of Technology; Policy Analysis, Simon Fraser University

Martin J. Bliemel 

Australian School of Business - Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Armstrong Murira 

affiliation not provided to SSRN

August 31, 2010

Abstract:    
Great opportunities and radical innovation are most likely to occur at the convergence of two or more technology streams. A bio-nano sector is emerging from such a convergence and may eventually provide radical innovation and new dominant firms. As there are no comprehensive reviews on this emerging sector, this paper provides a descriptive overview, identifying what types of firms are entering, from what knowledge base, where they are located, and their strategic choices in terms of technological diversity, R&D strategy, business model, and areas of clinical focus.

The firms engaged in bio-nano research and development span the range from start-up firm to multinational pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical, and electronics firms: three quarters of bio-nano firms are relatively young and relatively small. The United States dominates this sector, with more than half of all bio-nano firms located in the USA. Even within this sector which epitomizes the convergence of technology, there is a broad range of technological diversity, with the most diverse firms overall coming from a base in electronics, the most diverse start-up firms coming from a base in nanomaterials, and the most narrowly focused firms coming from a biotechnology/pharmaceutical base. We compare firm size with R&D strategy. The smaller firms have less diverse patent portfolios and are more likely to follow a hybridization knowledge diversity strategy, while the larger firms have more diverse patent portfolios and more widespread use of a juxtaposition R&D strategy.

Keywords: knowledge diversity, biotechnology, nanotechnology, technology convergence, radical innovation, emerging technology sector, hybridization, juxtaposition

Best Paper Award at EuroMOT and podcast on social networks

Somehow I hardly seem to find the incentive to blog about only one thing. It's only when there's at least two things to blog about that I log on.

Last Month (September), a paper I co-authored with Ian McCarthy and Elicia Maine won the best paper award at the Fourth European Conference on Management of Technology (or EuroMOT 2009 for short). The prestigious award was sponsored by Arthur D. Little, "the world's first and oldest management consulting firm". A copy of the paper, titled "In Search of Entrepreneurial Network Configurations: Using Q-Analysis to Study Network Structures and Flows" is available via SSRN.


The second part of this blog is that I just listened to a CBC Quirks and Quarks podcast over dinner, which featured this book:

I can't quite tell if the authors are rediscovering scale free networks and just analyzing one network at time (by association or behaviour: obesity, smoking, friendship, ..) or if there is more to this book than a new longitudinal dataset. It looks like they have a good publicist, since they're getting good reviews at CNN and NY Times. If I find a copy, I'll give it a read.

Ok, here's a third tidbit to blog about. While Eric Sanderson's TED talk was not very clear on how he crunched his numbers, I am intrigued to see he is overlaying multiple networks of species (animals, plants, humans) and related ecological attributes. This sounds not unlike my research on the interaction between structures and flows (see SSRN link above).