Reviewing a sample of management research published over the last 30 years in high-impact innovation-related management research journals, we found 270 papers that contain a wholly or partially defined commercialization construct. The current state of the art of commercialization-related research presents several fragmented and often divergent understandings of the construct, and no clear schools of thought or viewpoints with substantial scientific followings, besides a loose subsample of research relating commercialization to complementary assets.
Table 1 presents an overview of the frequency of the defining elements. This section illuminates these defining elements, showing how some of them fit together well, while others resist being included in the same coherent scientific construct.
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Table 1 – 364 elements of commercialization in definitions found in 270 research papers
Element Frequency
Product development 41
Product launch preparation 35
Product launch and initial marketing 55
Newness 45
Exploitation 130
Complementary assets 48
A portion of the papers define commercialization as a component of product development. Such a perspective often uses commercialization as an umbrella term for a specific stage in the development of new offerings, although that stage-specificity is far from uniform across the sample. An example is: “The commercialization phase starts after the design freeze. It involves the final product development modifications and the preparation and beginning of the production process and ends with the introduction to the marketplace” (Brettel, Heinemann, Engelen, & Neubauer, 2011, p. 253). Similarly, “successful commercialization of a new product in biotechnology involves a lengthy and expensive product discovery and development phase, culminating in the final FDA approval” (De Carolis, Yang, Deeds, & Nelling, 2009, p. 151). A significant discussion in papers with a product-development view of commercialization is the role of the design stage of new offerings, and in the similar vein, if and when customer interaction is part of or separate from commercialization.
More specifically, some papers apply the concept of commercialization more narrowly, as the preparation of a product or service to be released to the market, though not including the actual product launch. An example can be found in Chiesa and Frattini (2011, p. 439): “Strategic decisions are taken prior to the
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launch of the innovation, and even before starting its development. They essentially define the context in which the launch of the new product occurs.” In this view, commercialization typically involves the marketing department and is often related to longer-term strategic choices. This is in contrast to papers that apply a commercialization construct centered on the actual launch and initial marketing of offerings. In such interpretations, commercialization describes the process of releasing a product or service to the market. Borah and Tellis (2014, p.
123), for example, refer to commercialization in the following manner: “We measure the number of commercializations by the number of new product launches per year.” Research resting on this understanding is often associated with issues related to implementation and early feedback from potential or early customers. It is a popular definition among econometric papers as it is easy to measure.
Innovation is often associated with newness for the commercializing organization or the customers, and novelty is similarly found as an element in commercialization constructs in several papers, as in Coates and McDermott (2002, p. 442): “Our analysis suggests that the development of the emerging technology and the subsequent commercialization of that technology created a number of new competencies at Analog Devices.” The focus on handling new products and services in such definitions hence positions commercialization as a theoretical construct different from ongoing sales and marketing.
Commercialization is, however, most often understood as direct exploitation of innovation. Interestingly, such a perspective is almost the direct opposite of interpretations of commercialization as newness and instead encompasses the distinct skills, activities, and capabilities that ensure the ongoing delivery of a product or service. As such, commercialization is defined as all of the market-oriented processes that follow a new product’s development to ensure return on investment: “Basic economic analysis suggests that any new investment in
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additional development or commercialization of a patented technology is justified only if the value of the discounted cash inflows from the investment is greater than the cost of the investment” (Levitas & Chi, 2010, p. 218). Similarly, Bohlmann, Spanjil, Qualls, and Rosa (2013, p. 237) note: “The firm’s product strategy becomes manifest through product platform development and the commercialization of specific products.” This view is aligned with the general interpretation of commercialization at Oxford Dictionaries:19 “The process of managing or running something principally for financial gain.” It is noteworthy that many of these papers deal particularly with university technology transfers and related topics, and are often vague about whether commercialization as exploitation is a process or an event.
The candidate closest to a shared “school” of commercialization thought is research related to complementary assets. Originally proposed by Teece (1986), this contingency interpretation sees commercialization as an overall process involving complementary assets. In particular, Teece (1986) emphasizes that firms need complementary assets, such as product development, production, and marketing, to ensure successful commercialization. Commercialization activities, indeed, require and enable a firm to build complementary assets (Teece, Rumelt, Dosi & Winter, 1994). A statement to this effect can be found in Chatterji and Fabrizio (2014, p. 1431): “firms develop complementary assets to support commercialization.”
As the above discussion illustrates, the construct of commercialization has been assigned substantially different meanings, spanning from single distinct events (e.g., a launch) to an entire process involving a multitude of more fluid events (e.g., NPD); it may further be viewed as including either only new offerings or the entirety of product lifecycle management. Given the diversity in
19 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/commercialization. Last accessed March 27, 2016, at 21:46 CET.
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the use of the construct, use is at best inconsistent and likely ambiguous. The ambiguity is not unsolvable, however, and we therefore turn to Whetten’s (1989) considerations for what contributes a theoretical contribution, which highlights that good theory rests on the three building blocks of what, how, and why. These three building blocks guide the analysis of theoretical foundations needed to deconstruct commercialization as a scientific construct and will be presented in the next section.