STRATEGIC ALLIANCES BETWEEN LARGE AND SMALL HIGH-TECH FIRMS (THE SMALL FIRM LICENSING OPTION)

In this paper, I have used the material gathered from the interviews w ith directors of the three companies studied, to attempt to understand why they have been successful in their respective licensing agreement s. Specifically, I examine three related questions: why licensing may be a beneficial form of partnering for the small firm to take?; how th e small firm may protect itself in the agreements?; and the importance of the boundary spanning role and micro-bargaining situations struck at the firm boundaries. Clearly, any 'results' and/or conclusions are tentative and point to the need for further work in this area. This pa per does attempt to address a relatively overlooked area of research a nd study, that of small/large firm alliances using licensing as thr pr eferred mode of partnering. The majority of the literature published t o date in this area subsume licensing as a governance structure under the wider umbrella of strategic alliances. In addition, research in th ese topics tends to lean towards the large firm as licensor. In this p aper, the reader will see this reversed, ie, small firm as licensor. T he research was conducted via in-depth interviews with various personn el of the companies involved and took a grounded theory approach in ex ploring and gathering the data. This methodology was adopted due to th e lack of existing research in this topic and therefore the need to ge nerate new data.