Technological innovation is defined as commercialising an invention, inventing a product and taking it to market. While having a “great idea” is essential and important, alone it is not sufficient to result in commercialisation. Innovation is a social process that depends upon the building of relationships resulting from substantial search endeavours. Networks are fundamental to innovation. However, there are inherent tensions and difficulties in the innovation process which may render some networks ineffective and constrain the process of innovation, particularly when the commercialisation is of public research.
For example, a major impediment is that commercialisation of public research requires the coming together of two very different communities of practice – public research organisations and private firms – each with their own values, measures of worth, language and hierarchy. This makes forming and maintaining network ties for the purposes of innovation a complex enterprise.
Using the latest advances in statistical models for multilevel social networks, the project will detail the important substructures of collaboration networks which lead to commercialisation success and failure, providing insights to the barriers of the commercialisation process. As its empirical focus, this project examines innovation projects at multiple sites around the world that involve the use of controlled radical polymerisation which is a platform technology that, in contrast to a single use technology, has a much larger potential innovation and economic impact because it can be applied in multiple ways in multiple domains.