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Business Partners: Complementary Assets, Financing, and Invention Commercialization
Author(s) -
Åstebro Thomas,
Serrano Carlos J.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of economics and management strategy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.672
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1530-9134
pISSN - 1058-6407
DOI - 10.1111/jems.12095
Subject(s) - commercialization , revenue , complementary assets , business , finance , sample (material) , order (exchange) , economics , marketing , chemistry , chromatography
This paper assesses the relative importance of the complementary assets and financial capital that business partners may add to the original inventor‐entrepreneur. Projects run by partnerships were five times as likely to reach commercialization as those without business partners, and they had mean revenues approximately 10 times as great as projects run by solo entrepreneurs. These gross differences may be due both to partners impacting business success that is, who the particular partners were, and to selection of the type of project or of whom to select as a partner. After controlling for selection effects and observed/unobserved heterogeneity, the smallest estimate of partners' complementary assets approximately doubles the probability of commercialization and increases expected revenues by 29% at the sample mean. Our findings suggest that a critical policy option to increase commercialization rates and revenues for early‐stage businesses is to support the market for finding skilled partners.