Profiting from Enabling Technologies?

Alfonso Gambardella (), Sohvi Heaton (), Elena Novelli () and David J. Teece ()
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Alfonso Gambardella: Department of Management and Technology and Invernizzi Center for Research on Innovation, Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship (ICRIOS), Università Bocconi, 20136 Milan, Italy; and Centre for Economic Policy Research, London EC1V 0DX, United Kingdom;
Sohvi Heaton: College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California 90045;
Elena Novelli: Cass Business School, City, University of London, London EC1Y 8TZ, United Kingdom;
David J. Teece: Haas School of Business, Institute for Business Innovation, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720

Strategy Science, 2021, vol. 6, issue 1, 75-90

Abstract: How to profit from innovation has been an important question for both innovation scholars and practitioners over the years. It is certainly a relevant question for all types of technological innovation, including emerging ones. David J. Teece’s profiting from innovation (PFI) framework [Teece DJ (1986) Profiting from technological innovation: Implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy. Res. Policy 15(6):285–305.] sets forth a theory of the relevant contingencies. However, Teece’s framework focuses on technologies with applications in specific domains. We focus on the question of how to profit from enabling technologies : technologies that are applicable across multiple domains. We argue that capturing value in such circumstances is fundamentally different from profiting from less-enabling technologies and raises new issues with respect to the relevant business models and public policies. This paper’s contribution is threefold. It formally revises and extends the original PFI framework to include the case of enabling technologies, it provides empirical evidence to support the distinction between profiting from enabling and profiting from narrower “discrete” technologies, and it generates perspectives on the appropriate business models for these technologies and discusses related public policy implications, in light of the fact that the share of the benefits the innovator can capture is likely to be even smaller for enabling than for discrete technologies.

Keywords: profiting from innovation; enabling technologies; general-purpose technologies; appropriability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

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