The relationship between organisational factors and technology commercialisation performance in Australian technology-based companies

Every year companies invest significant amounts of money in research and development (R&D) activities. A company spends money on R&D activities to ensure that the company maintains its competitiveness by continuously producing innovative products. However, R&D activities should result in products which are not only innovative but also can be sold for a profit. To realise that objective, R&D activities should be supported by technology commercialisation activities. Commercialisation activities are crucial for technology-based companies to make sure that there is income to support continuing R&D activities, to repay their investors, and to make a profit. Technology commercialisation performance varies among companies. Some companies succeed in commercialising their technology, while others fail. The number of new technology-based products introduced to the market is relatively small compared to the number of research ideas. This phenomenon suggests a need for studies of factors that can explain technology commercialisation successes and failures. It is important to understand the drivers of technology commercialisation performance in order to increase the success rate and reduce the failure rate. Few previous studies have considered organisational factors especially with respect to commercialisation in technology-based companies. In this thesis, organisational orientation, organisational structure, and organisational culture are hypothesised to play important roles. Organisational structure represents an explicit aspect of the organisation, while organisational orientation and culture represent implicit aspects. It has long been known that organisational factors impact on company performance. Much of the literature has sought to analyse the relationship between organisational factors and company performance. However, little research has been done on the relationship between commercialisation-related organisational factors and technology commercialisation performance. This thesis explores organisational factors related to technology commercialisation and their influence on technology commercialisation performance. Those factors are expected to have significant relationships to a company’s technology commercialisation success. This research uses a mixed method approach, combining a quantitative method (survey) and a qualitative method (interviews) to achieve the research’s objective. The results of the quantitative study confirm some of the hypotheses. The hypotheses that customer orientation, innovation orientation, horizontal integration, and adaptability culture are related to technology commercialisation capability and the hypothesis that technology commercialisation capability is related to technology commercialisation performance are accepted, while the hypotheses that competitor orientation, communication and the locus of decision making are related to technology commercialisation capability are not supported. The results of the qualitative study enrich the results of the quantitative study by giving real examples from companies’ day-to-day activities to explain the hypothesis testing result. The results of this research help to explain the relationship between organisational factors and technology commercialisation performance and make contributions from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. From a theoretical perspective, the research contributes to a broader application of the Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV) in technology commercialisation research area, through exploring intangible resources (organisational factors) and capability (technology commercialisation capability) that relate to technology commercialisation performance. From a practical perspective, the research provides managers with insights into ways of using organisational factors to improve technology commercialisation performance, thereby reducing the commercialisation failure rate and increasing the commercialisation success rate in the technology-based companies.