“Research transforms money into knowledge … technology transfer transforms knowledge into money.” Geoffrey Nicholson, father of the Post-It[1]
Isn’t business-to-business (B2B) technology transfer innovation?
In the foreword to his book, The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Chesbrough, (2006), sees innovation as an invention implemented and taken to the market. This should theoretically close the argument of where B2B technology transfer resides in the business and in academic discussion. As the entire premise of B2B technology transfer is implementing technology in the market with another business by transferring knowledge, skills or/and technology from one organisation to another.
Through technology transfer, organisations can access and leverage external innovations, which can lead to the development of new products, services, or processes. It facilitates the diffusion of technological advancements across industries and regions, promoting collaboration, knowledge exchange and the generation of new ideas. In this it is innovative and plays a vital role in fostering innovation.
However, while technology transfer plays a crucial role in disseminating existing knowledge and technologies, it is not necessarily synonymous with innovation. The typical viewpoint here is that technology transfer is about the implementation of existing technology or knowledge not the creation of new ideas. Despite incremental improvements or modifications to the technology arguably it is not likely to represent a groundbreaking advancement.
Another argument is that unlike innovation which is a response to a market demand (Cottrill et al., 2016), B2B transfer of existing technology is technology-led and requires the additional activity of understanding the potential of the existing technology then looking for an opportunity to exploit not necessarily the other way round.
Despite this differentiation it does warrant consideration. In academia, innovation is typically seen as a sociological discipline with a strong focus on individual actors, flow of knowledge and adoption. Whereas technology transfer focusses on organisational, producer-led processes (Cottrill et al., 2016). However, there is a risk of over-simplification in the characteristic views presented by Cottrill et al., (2016). For example, Chesbrough, (2006), talks about the rapid business model prototyping as critical to the future of technological innovation, which is an organisation, producer-led process focused topic, not associated with innovation in Cottrill’s view.
The activity of identifying new market opportunities for existing technology with other businesses is innovative. It is also an activity to explore technological opportunities (Noh & Lee, 2019) that does not necessitate an innovation-led positioning. I’d argue, at this stage in the research, that positioning B2B technology transfer into a distinct field, in this instance technology transfer or innovation, needs to be driven by the topic i.e., are we looking at organisational processes or are we studying team motivation, and may not be a simple either, or positioning.
There are still a lot of questions over this perspective, which is merely an opportunity to direct ongoing research. So, as part of our research, we are tackling the question of whether B2B technology transfer is or isn’t or can be an innovation activity, not just innovative in its nature.
If you’d like to hear the latest on our research and join in the discussion on all things B2B technology transfer, join our LinkedIn group ‘Business-to-Business Technology Transfer’.
References
Chesbrough, H. (2006). Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm: Oxford University Press, 1–12.
Cottrill, C. A., Rogers, E. M., & Mills, T. (2016). Co-citation Analysis of the Scientific Literature of Innovation Research Traditions. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1177/107554708901100204, 11(2), 181–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/107554708901100204
Noh, H., & Lee, • Sungjoo. (2019). Where technology transfer research originated and where it is going: a quantitative analysis of literature published between 1980 and 2015. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 44, 700–740. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9634-4
Footnotes
[1] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/technology-transfer/what-technology-transfer_en?language_content_entity=en