Taking Technical Risks: How Innovators, Managers, and Investors Manage Risk in High-Tech Innovations

Branscomb, Lewis M.; Auerswald, Philip E.

ISBN 10: 026202490X / ISBN 13: 9780262024907

Published by The MIT Press, 2001

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 112961

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Taking Technical Risks: How Innovators, Managers, and Investors Manage Risk in High-Tech Innovations
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026202490X
• ISBN 13: 9780262024907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 17 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

How do technology innovators, business executives, and venture capitalists manage the technical elements of business risk when developing and launching new products? Overcoming technical risks requires crossing the so-called valley of death—the gap between demonstrating the soundness of a technical concept in a controlled setting and readying the product technology for the market. Crossing the valley of death may mean bringing university-based research to the point where it appears viable to venture capitalists, or bridging the cultural gap between technical innovators and the managers who are being asked to risk their institutional resources. In every context, purely technical risks are coupled with the market risks inherent in innovation.

In this book Lewis Branscomb and Philip Auerswald address early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision making and innovation policy. The topics addressed include the extent to which purely technical risk is separable from market risk; how industrial managers make decisions on funding early-stage, high-risk technology projects; and under what circumstances government can and should act to reduce the technical risks of innovative projects so that firms will invest in them. The book includes contributions by Mary Good, George Hartmann, James McGroddy, Mike Myers, Michael Roberts, and F. M. Scherer.

About the Author

Lewis M. Branscomb is Aetna Professor in Public Policy and Corporate Management, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is coeditor of Industrializing Knowledge (MIT Press, 1999) and of Investing in Innovation (MIT Press, 1998). Philip E. Auerswald is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.