What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of collaborating on a development project?
Sharing expenses and development risks, combining complementary skills and resources, enabling information transfer across enterprises, the joint creation of new knowledge, and easing the creation of shared standards are all advantages of collaboration. Collaboration has drawbacks, such as deciding whether a partner’s resources are a good fit, the risk of exploitation, and the expropriation of a firm’s knowledge with little in return. Loss of direction control, total benefit, resource development, and absorptive capacity.
How does the mode of collaborating (for example, strategic alliance, joint venture, licensing, outsourcing, collective research organization) influence the success of collaboration?
It depends less on the manner of collaboration than on how well-suited partners are to each other, including their relative size and strength, resource complementarity, resource alignment, and value and culture similarities – their resource and strategy fit. Once the resource and strategy fit is determined, the model of collaboration provides the governance and monitoring methods, standards, and expectations for the project.
Identify an example of collaboration between two or more organizations. What were the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration versus solo development? What collaboration mode did the partners choose?
Collaborations like the one between Sangamo and Biogen (case study). Sangamo has access to finances to continue development and a partner (Biogen) with expertise in advanced clinical trials and drug commercialization because of the relationship. Biogen obtained access to proprietary technology (as well as unspoken knowledge about ZFNs) with a potential profit margin bigger than their initial investment. A license agreement was used based on the case study. The benefits of this strategy for Biogen included quick access to technology at a lower cost than internal development and the leveraging of existing expertise; for Sangamo, the benefits included maintaining control of proprietary technology and acquiring resources to stay solvent.
The disadvantages of collaboration included that the collaboration objective was not central to either firm’s long-term objectives (for Biogen, a risky allocation of resources on future development, for Sangamo, a distraction from product commercialization forcing resources to be allocated to a specific application of ZFNs).
Explain the concepts Patent, Trademark, and Copyright.
Patent
A patent is a property right granted to an inventor by a sovereign body. It is a sort of intellectual property that grants its owner the legal right to prevent others from creating, using, or selling an invention for a set number of years in exchange for the innovation’s public disclosure.
Trademark
A trademark is a form of intellectual property that consists of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that distinguishes one source’s products or services from those of another.
Copyright
Copyright is a sort of intellectual property that grants the owner the exclusive right to produce copies of creative work for a specific period. Reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution are all common examples of these rights.
What is the R&D budget for a technology company? Why it is so important for them?
A technology business’s R&D budget is a metric that helps the company decide what percentage of its income is dedicated to research and development. The R&D budget is vital to a technological company because it covers all costs connected with discovering new information and turning research findings into plans or designs for new goods to make them more efficient and effective, including personnel, materials, and overhead.
Explain the following terms:
a) Start-up firms
Start-up companies are small businesses that were created with the goal of creating a unique product or service, bringing it to market, and making it compelling and irreplaceable for clients. They have new roots in innovation and seek to remedy the shortcomings of existing products.
b) Entrepreneurship.
The entrepreneur is defined as someone who has the capacity and drive to create, manage, and succeed in a start-up enterprise, as well as the risk and initiative that comes with it, to generate profits and benefits. Entrepreneurship is the process of starting a business having all these characteristics.
c) Angel investors
Angel investors are those with the financial means and freedom to inject cash or capital into a start-up firm or an entrepreneur in exchange for ownership or convertible debt because they trust in the company and feel it will thrive. Angel investors support ventures on a personal level and like to work with entrepreneurs and businesses.