Patchworking Network Structures

In recent years, establishing successful collaborative arrangements and relationships between university, industry and public institutions has come to be seen as essential in transforming new scientific knowledge into new innovations and business ventures. The fit between these very different actor groups has been treated as a contingent factor. However, little attention has been given to the managerial efforts that entrepreneurs have make to establish the fit between small firms, university research, and public policies such as regulatory policies and R&D policies through network-type structures. New biotechnology organizations are perfect objects to study these relationships because new biotechnologies and techniques predominantly come from the university sector (Kenney, 1986; Yoxen; 1984; Zucker & Darby, 1997; Robbins-Roth, 2001). From the perspective of the small biotechnology firms (SBFs,) this paper analyzes four different managerial strategies of how to create network structures to deal with the interfaces between industry, university and public institutions. The research-oriented strategy, the incubator strategy, the industrial-partnering strategy, and the policyoriented strategy. The research-oriented strategy focuses narrowly on how biotechnology firms transform scientific results into solid business plan or business models revealing the aim of the technologies, services or products. The incubator strategy is concerned with localization and how to overcome specific types of managerial problems in the initial stage of forming a business venture. The industrialpartnering strategy is concerned with how to overcome the problem of bringing the technologies from an experimental stage at a research lab to be able to handle industrial processes and full-scale production. Last, but not least, the policy-oriented strategy focuses on the problem of having products approved by the public authorities. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how SBFs over time develop network structures through patchwork-like activities, ongoing and overlapping activities, that serve as a blueprint for the managemen