Abstract
Increasingly, the global economy relies on the commercialization of technology and entrepreneurship as the twin engines for economic growth. The gap between fundamental R&D and market diffusion is being bridged by systematic technology transfer and commercialization efforts within universities, national labs as well as in corporate settings. This gap is particularly tricky to navigate in the life sciences and energy sectors, where the long development cycles, need to rely on complementary assets, variations in public policy, and uncertain market growth require organizations to set up uniquely flexible and responsive operations while the underlying technologies become commercially viable. For instance, many large R&D organizations have set up labs close to major research universities and restructured business processes to ease technology transfer and to promote cost and knowhow sharing. The role of entrepreneurial firms, and allied institutions, in taking risks while experimenting with new type of business models in order to exacerbate such commercialization and growth has been recognized in the business press. Management theorists argue that stable organizational forms and processes, that have traditionally driven innovation and created employment and wealth, are being replaced by entrepreneurial operations as primary growth mechanisms in many industries.
Yet, the knowledge of setting up, running, and terminating such operations has not kept up with the evolution of the market place. Traditional assumptions about modeling operations, such as decoupling of operational and financing decisions, modes of product and process knowhow exchanges and allied theories on inventories, capacity and productivity can break down in these settings. On the other hand, judging by the research proposals to national level funding bodies, and the number of students who enroll in related courses, researchers and practitioners' interest in studying such operations is growing.
The purpose of the special issue on