Abstract
It is well known from previous studies that R&D collaboration is important to firms’ technological development, especially in business-to-business (B2B) markets. This includes empirical studies carried out in the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) tradition focusing on the role and importance of interaction, business relationships and industrial networks (e.g. Baraldi, 2003; Baraldi, Gressetvold, & Harrison, 2012; Gressetvold, 2004; Håkansson, 1987; Håkansson & Waluszewski, 2002, 2007; Laage-Hellman, 1997; Wedin, 2001) as well as other types of innovation studies (e.g. McKelvey, Zaring, & Ljungberg, 2015; Melander, 2014; von Hippel, 1988). Innovation thus tends to be the outcome of interaction processes between different types of actors including, for example, selling and buying firms.
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CSE runs a master’s programme in entrepreneurship and business design at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.
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The text in this section is based on a longer case description in Laage-Hellman and Rickne (2014).
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- 5.
The text in this section is based on a longer case description in Laage-Hellman (2012).
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Another example of a forced partner change is described in Laage-Hellman (2012, Ch. 6). Promimic, a developer of a new coating technique, had a strategic partnership with Nobel Biocare, a world-leading manufacturer of dental implants. When the latter, for internal reasons, decided to terminate the joint R&D project, Promimic had to start searching for new partners, which it eventually found in another application field—orthopaedic implants.
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Oxeon, another research-based start up that we are now studying, has successfully applied this strategy (Laage-Hellman, Landqvist, & Lind, 2016). This company is commercialising a unique technology for making carbon fibre composites. It started off by focusing on Formula 1 teams, a small but innovative market segment that offered the possibility of carrying out real-life tests and achieving early sales. This paved the way for entering the much larger segment for sporting goods where the customer needs are similar and the product life cycles are relatively short. This is Oxeon’s core business today. The aeronautical industry is another large segment that the company is now approaching.
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Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to Anna Dubois for inspiration and encouragement and for initiating the ‘Start ups starting up project’, which in different ways forms a base for this chapter.
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Laage-Hellman, J., Landqvist, M., Lind, F. (2017). 5 R&D Collaboration and Start Ups. In: Aaboen, L., La Rocca, A., Lind, F., Perna, A., Shih, T. (eds) Starting Up in Business Networks. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52719-6_6
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