Coopetitive Strategies for Knowledge Creation.Managing University-Industry Relationships in Biotechnology

This chapter focuses on coopetitive strategies that biotech ventures may adopt in managing academic collaboration. In the last decade, universities are experiencing an ongoing cultural change, stemming from the new regulatory settings, which push them to behave entrepreneurially by patenting their research and boosting technology transfer. This recent phenomenon arises new questions about rent appropriation and academic publishing activities which firms partnering with universities have to consider for capturing economic rent. We propose coopetition as a suitable approach to look at the university-industry relationships since it encompasses both cooperation for generating new knowledge and competition for appropriating value. We analyze the case of Humane Genome Project which depicts how overlapped private and public interests foster the search for new avenues able to intermingle scientific and commercial goals. The chapter suggests that new coopetitive strategies, like sequencing strategy, sanitizing data strategy, co-joint patenting, emerge as endeavours to balance the quest for knowledge and the quest for profit. Due to the novelty of the topic covered in this study, the research is exploratory in nature.