Technology sourcing in the medical devices industry: The role of technology characteristics and organizational context.

摘要

The focus of this study is technology sourcing in the new product development process, and, specifically, how characteristics of the technology influence the sourcing decision. The five technology characteristics that are investigated in this study are rarity, inimitability, nonsubstitutability, value, and maturity. Also considered are two aspects of the organizational context that may moderate the relationships between technology attributes and the sourcing mode. The first of these organizational aspects is the extent to which the firm follows an incremental or a radical innovation strategy. The second is the extent to which the firm operates under an open innovation model. Data were gathered in exploratory interviews with R&D executives in Finland and the U.S. and, for hypotheses testing, through surveys of R&D executives in the U.S. The study is confined to a single industry, that being the medical devices industry, and the unit of analysis is at the level of the individual technology. Support is found for the hypothesized relationship between value and internal sourcing and for the interaction effect between value and open innovation. Partial support is found for the relationship between inimitability and internal sourcing. The remaining hypotheses are not supported by this data. In a supplemental path model analysis, a complex relationship was found to exist among several of the technology characteristics studied: inimitability and nonsubstitutability lead to rarity, rarity leads to value, and value leads to internal development of the technology.