An article co-authored by Haas Professor David Teece and two PhD alumni won the 2012 best article award from the California Management Review (CMR), the Haas School's peer-reviewed management journal for both academics and business practitioners.
Teece and co-authors Deepak Somaya, PhD 02, of the University of Illinois, and Simon Wakeman, PhD 07, of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin, won the $2,500 prize. Their article, "Innovation in Multi-Invention Contexts: Mapping Solutions to Technological and Intellectual Property Complexity," was published in CMR's summer 2011 issue.
The award is given each year to the author or authors of the CMR article published in the preceding volume that has made the most important contribution to improving the practice of management. Articles are initially judged by CMR's editorial board, and the selection is made by a panel of senior executives.
The winning article focused on ways in which companies that create complicated products can successfully deal with technological and intellectual property complexity. The authors used case studies of four tech companies producing very different products─Blackberry developer Research In Motion, molecular diagnostics firm Epigenomics, semiconductor processor designer ARM, and memory product designer and manufacturer Kentron Technologies─-to demonstrate the effectiveness and challenges of various organizational models and patent strategies.
Teece, Somaya, and Wakeman explain that when commercializing innovation, tech companies must choose between two basic organizational models: integrated or non-integrated. In the integrated model, companies control as many of the technologies and assets as they can in-house. In the non-integrated model─sometimes known as open innovation, a term popularized by another PhD alumnus, Haas Adjunct Professor Henry Chesbrough, PhD 97─companies create market relationships with other entities by licensing their technology or selling components. As a result, products are composed of elements from a variety of sources.