Collaboration-Enabled Technology Commercialization in the High-Tech Firm: Knowledge Creation and the Systemic Perspective

Abstract

The NPD management literature has discussed that technology commercialization (TC) performance is enhanced by three distinct yet highly complementary factors: cross-functional collaboration, knowledge creation), and system theory. A significant amount of existing literature has supported the importance of collaboration strategy on TC performance, but some empirical studies examining the relationship between collaboration strategy and TC performance present discordant results. The research objectives of this study are as follows. (1) To investigate how cross-functional collaboration affects technology commercialization performance through their effects on the design of knowledge creation. (2)To explore the mediating roles of knowledge creation on the relationships between cross-functional collaboration and technology commercialization performance. (3)To demonstrate the systems theory affects the relationship among cross-functional collaboration, knowledge creation and technology commercialization performance. This study used the remaining 203 valid (response rate of 47.88%) and complete questionnaires for the quantitative analysis, and the sample size was acceptable for AMOS analysis. This study contributes to NPD theory of TC in three main ways. First, the direct effect of cross-functional collaboration spreads new light on the importance assigned to the concept of collaborative orientation in TC process. Second, although we conducted a series of mediating test in this study but found no significant mediated effects of cross-functional collaboration on TC performance. Third, we ascertain that what organization problem matter in TC process by comprehensive methodology as systems theory.

Keywords: Cross-functional collaboration, knowledge creation, systems theory, technology commercialization