Commercialize Technology Assets Comprehensively: A Case Study for Automated Tissue Engineering

Competition has become increasingly technology based. From an economic perspective, the value appropriation of technologies is an essential part of technology management. While most industrial firms focus on the internal application of technologies in their own products and services, the external mode of technology exploitation, i.e. the commercialization of disembodied technological knowledge, has long been neglected. This is due to the fact that companies lack in a systematic approach to evaluate their technologies in terms of all available exploitation opportunities. The goal of the present paper is to propose a new approach for a decision making model to identify the appropriate exploitation strategy considering the key internal and external factors characterizing the commercialization situation. Therefore, a target system for technology exploitation is established and the contribution of the different exploitation strategies, such as spin-off, joint-venture and licensing to the different targets is evaluated. Afterwards the influence of the characteristics concerning market, exploiting company and technology is discussed. The decision making model is developed and applied on the case "Automated Tissue Engineering on Demand", which has been accomplished by the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT. The aim of the project was to identify the company and technology specific exploitation strategy for a production facility capable to automatically produce tissues on demand for toxicity and efficacy testing.