Standing on the shoulders of others: The role of universities and individual inventors in firms’ exploration of general-purpose technologies

Firms explore novel applications for new or existing products and technologies to identify market opportunities and tailor their offerings to effectively meet customer needs (Carlsson, 2016). Such exploration has been defined as the search beyond the existing resources, knowledge, and capabilities of the firm (Katila & Ahuja, 2002), potentially leading to the development of new-to-the-world innovation (Ahuja & Lampert, 2001). However, exploration comes with high technical and commercial uncertainty, as well as knowledge spill-outs, while costs and risks are incurred by the firm (Levinthal & March, 1993). This trade-off may lead many firms to avoid exploration and rather exploit the results of successful exploration carried out by other organizations, hence reducing the overall development of new ideas, technologies, products, or markets. At this aim, existing literature has emphasized how firms can reduce the uncertainty associated with developing new technologies by leveraging efforts of other ecosystem players, such as other firms, universities and research institutions (URIs), and even individual inventors. Existing work has considered how firms establish collaborations with academics to explore new technological fields (Peeters et al., 2020) and boost inventive performance (Colen et al., 2022). Yet, a more comprehensive view of how firms leverage efforts of other ecosystem players to engage in exploration rather than exploitation is missing. A salient case for investigating firms’ exploration behavior is offered by General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), which are characterized by high possibilities for recombination in terms of application areas. Nevertheless, the identification of the most profitable application areas is highly uncertain for emerging and science-based GPTs (Messeni Petruzzelli et al., 2023). This recombination effort is expected to be highly reliant on other ecosystem players, as the capabilities required to be effective in devising novel application areas and commercialization differ quite significantly from those required to develop new science (Gambardella & McGahan, 2010).