Abstract

This article describes a business model that is growing in prevalence and that carries novel implications: the development of general-purpose technologies for licensing to downstream specialists. In their archetypical format, these general-purpose technologies are constructed in ways that can be employed by different potential downstream licensees, and can accommodate their different strategies. This strengthens the hand of innovative firms in the rising markets for knowledge-based assets, and can be expected to improve their ability to capture a greater share of the value their technology creates. The innovation of business model designed for licensing such technologies will have unpredictable, but inevitable, consequences for industry structure and organizational capabilities, as well as for the content and context for the upstream science.