The Consequences of Commercialization Choices for New Entrants in High-Tech Industries: A Venture Emergence Perspective

In this paper, we study the commercialization choices of new firms entering in high-tech industries. Research on technology commercialization differentiates between the market for products and the market for ideas. We explore the determinants and consequences of the commercialization choice for these different markets. We test our hypotheses on longitudinal dataset of 453 new firms started in 2004 in different high-tech industries in the US. We find that that technology and human capital resources favor the adoption of alternative commercialization strategies; nevertheless, we do not observe significant differences in the venture emergence or survival likelihood. Our findings offer a closer view of the venture emergence process of new firms, clarifying the causes and consequences of the technology commercialization choices.