Peter M. Bican

Northwestern University | NU · Kellogg School of Management

This article introduces a framework that helps to assimilate intellectual property management activities with the practices of marketing and strategy. With the framework, the management of IP rights is explained within marketing constructs such as the unique selling proposition. The article presents case studies that explore the applicability of th...

COVID-19 has had devastating effects worldwide, and vaccines have become the most efficient solution to address the current pandemic situation thus far. After COVID-19 vaccines had been developed, discussions of the various countries’ equality of access gained traction, with patents and pricing forming a significant part of this discourse. Therefor...

To profit from their inventions, multinational enterprises rely on various appropriation and internationalization strategies. Intellectual property modularity serves as a reliable option to master the tradeoff between owning the “right” (i.e., valuable) patents in a technology and sharing other “less valuable” patents to spur innovation and foster...

Prior research has identified a positive relationship between open innovation collaboration and innovation performance. This paper asks whether this positive relationship reported in the literature is partially driven by measurement error, e.g., misclassifications of firms’ intra-group transfers of knowledge as interactions external to the firms. U...

With the advent of climate change and global pollution, the SDGs have become an inevitable new paradigm: It is increasingly recognized that SDG-compliant investing and policy design have the potential to reshape entire industries and positively impact the development of corporation, economies, and societies. With 80% of all technical inventions bec...

With the climate crisis looming, innovations are no longer judged by their technical prowess alone but also on their sustainability. Frugal innovations have attracted significant attention in this regard. These user-friendly, cost-effective, and resource-efficient solutions of appropriate quality provide significant value to users and end customers...

This research investigated influential factors on changes in networks of startups through a qualitative exploratory case study approach. Based on interviews with founders in Germany and selected stakeholders in entrepreneurial networks combined with a network mapping approach, we developed a framework of influential factors on network changes. In e...

Multiple emerging technologies both threaten grocers and offer them attractive opportunities to enhance their value propositions, improve processes, reduce costs, and therefore generate competitive advantages. Among the variety of technological innovations and considering the scarcity of resources, it is unclear which technologies to focus on and w...

Recent digital transformation initiatives facilitate the access to platform-based business models on the demand side as well as enabling the necessary proximity to potential customers on the supply side. Due to this network connectivity between people, organizations, resources and entire industries, value and economic growth can be generated within...

Crises like the COVID‐19 pandemic affect firms’ innovation management and decision making. On the downside, crises lead to detriments like budget constraints, to which firms often respond by reducing their innovation activities. On the upside, crises are opportunities, where some firms exploiting changing market requirements and necessities excel....

This study examines the gender gap in investment decisions in a prominent setting: the American TV show Shark Tank. Our study is based on a sample of 895 pitches from 10 seasons comprising 222 episodes from 2009 to 2019. Contradicting prior research, our findings suggest that female entrepreneurs are not discriminated against in pitch success rates...

The innovation of products, services, and business models is key to firm survival, performance, and growth in today’s turbulent business environments. However, accelerating environmental dynamics also require speeding up the innovation process. A suitable solution may be the use of agility, especially at the front end of innovation. In this study,...

Can entrepreneurs learn from failure? Using frameworks from attribution theory, we draw on unique qualitative data from entrepreneurs who had experienced failure before re-engaging in entrepreneurial activities. We find that the direction of failure attribution, as either attributed to external or internal causes, affects learning from failure diff...

Can entrepreneurs learn from failure? Using frameworks from attribution theory, we draw on unique qualitative data from entrepreneurs who had experienced failure before re-engaging in entrepreneurial activities. We find that the direction of failure attribution, as either attributed to external or internal causes, affects learning from failure diff...

Hrsg.: quer.kraft – der Innovationsverein e.V., Nürnberg, 2018–2020. Diese Leitfaden gibt eine Übersicht darüber, welche Kennzahlen grundsätzlich für die Anwendung in frühen Phasen des Innovationsprozesses herangezogen werden können. Aus der Literatur zusammengetragene Kennzahlen wurden im Arbeitskreis bewertet, diskutiert und eingeschätzt. Dabei...

This study empirically analyses the effects of five critical success factors on the front end of innovation and new product development success. Data from a self-developed questionnaire on a cross-industry sample of 77 German-based small- and medium-sized firms were collected through an online survey. Accouting for factors not included in previous...

After the 2007-08 global financial crisis, research flourished on entrepreneurship through digital innovation in the financial market as well as on investors' influence on digital technology-based entrepreneurs' funding decisions. This study combines these two research streams to analyze the decision-making criteria for funding financial technology...

The Lean Startup approach and its related Minimum Viable Product thinking is one of the key trends not only in entrepreneurship, but also in more and more established companies. Before this background, this paper experimentally investigates whether and how the Lean Startup approach improves innovation processes in established companies. For this, t...

Tradition is the topic of intense public attention and scholarly debate, despite lacking elucidations of its constituents in management research. Precisely, tradition effects on firms are presupposed and discussed in absence of theoretical foundations. Based on historic views, we draw on sociological and philosophical research and transfer the theo...

Attaining competitive advantage is especially crucial for innovative firms. Due to increased competition, firms employ various types of innovation activities to position themselves against their competitors. Ambidexterity and strategic agility have been found to strengthen this position. Whereas scholars analyzed strategic agility’s and ambidexteri...

Digitalization plays a major role in contributing towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Without transformation of existing businesses, both economic and environmental challenges of the future cannot be solved sustainably. However, there is much confusion on interrelationships and terms dealing with digitization or digitalization...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: Thomas Riedel, Lorena Soto, and Florian Fuchs, the three founders of PikoGym, had the idea to build a workout device that would allow the user to train anywhere. The lightweight and compact device could be packed in users’ travel gear and taken on journeys. PikoGym would also be a companion app that would be embe...

Research on R&D performance measures applied in firms is still scarce. Based on the established “R&D laboratory as a system” thinking, systematically derive and identify R&D department level key performance measures. Through a mixed‐method approach, grounded in (1) literature and (2) text analysis, 154 R&D performance measures were developed. Among...

Even though the number of working women has steadily increased over the last few years, women are still significantly under-represented in STEM activities (i.e. mathematics, informatics, science and technology). In order to eliminate this under-representation, numerous education policies and corporate initiatives, particularly in the recent past,...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: Three scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) planned to start their own academic spinoff by commercializing a new software technology they had developed. The underlying software technology was invented by the scientists, but legally owned by KIT because the scientists were employed by KIT durin...

More and more, established companies try to cooperate with start-ups, build their own, or try to imitate their mindsets. But, do they make decisions like expert entrepreneurs? Effectuation theory describes entrepreneurial decision-making, it has been popular in entrepreneurship research for the last two decades, but still underexplored in contexts...

Prior literature analysed why incubators exist and how to differentiate the various incubator types. However, measures that lead incubators to run as independent, self-sufficient incubation ecosystems remain largely absent. Incubators were divided in self-sufficient and non-self-sufficient institutions based on the criteria ability to cover the ope...

The spread of electric mobility in Germany lags far behind government's targets. High vehicle and energy prices, the limited vehicle range and obligatory time-consuming conductive charging processes are the main obstacles to mass adoption. Strategic mobility concepts, such as electric vehicles with high performance batteries (BEV), hydrogen technol...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: For the Deutscher Fussball-Bund e.V. (DFB)—the German Football Association and the world’s largest registered association, with approximately 6.9 million members—winning the most prestigious football trophy, the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, was the culmination of a long p...

Die Ausgaben für Forschung und Entwicklung von Wirtschaft und Staat sollen in der Europäischen Union entsprechend der Lissabon-Strategie auf 3% des Bruttoinlandsprodukts gesteigert werden. Deutschland hat das 3%-Ziel bisher nur knapp verfehlt. Aber haben diese Anstrengungen wirklich zu mehr Innovations-Output und Wirtschaftswachstum geführt? Ist di...

Purpose As firms turn their innovation activities toward collaborating with external partners, they face additional challenges in managing their knowledge. While different modes of intellectual property right regimes are applied in closed innovation systems, there seems to be tension between the concepts of “open innovation” and “intellectual prop...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: Traditionally, the retail environment in Germany consisted of various specialized, often family-owned, small- to medium-sized retailers selling one or another of a variety of goods, such as books, lingerie, toys, or food. Many of these main street shops did not keep pace with globalization and the digital revolutio...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: As a typical family-owned German Mittelstand (small to medium-sized business) firm in the business-to- business market of tea and herbal extracts, the Martin Bauer Group (MBG) engages in multifaceted corporate social responsibility activities, both domestically and abroad. Specifically, it fosters the development a...

As firms turn their innovation activities towards collaborating with external partners, they face additional challenges in controlling their property. Whilst different modes of intellectual property regimes are applied in closed innovation systems, there seems to be tension between the concepts of “open innovation” and “intellectual property”. Exis...

As firms turn their innovation activities towards collaborating with external partners, they face additional challenges in controlling their property. Whilst different modes of intellectual property regimes are applied in closed innovation systems, there seems to be tension between the concepts of “open innovation” and “intellectual property”. Exis...

TEACHING CASE with TEACHING NOTE: Bayer Group needed to reassess its strategies regarding intellectual property, as well as its emphasis on research and development. The Indian government had ruled against Bayer by granting a compulsory licence to a local generic drug manufacturer that allowed them to distribute a copy of Bayer’s blockbuster cancer...

This study analyzes the relationship at the micro level between the patent system and the public domain, building upon the findings of the Study on Patents and the Public Domain (I). It seeks to enhance the understanding of the impact of certain enterprise practices in the field of patents on the public domain and on the important role of a rich an...