Commercializing academic research in emerging economies: Do organizational identities matter?

Evidence suggests that in several emerging economies, technology commercialization by universities is not quite institutionalized. Given this backdrop, we studied how research commercialization co-varied with two aspects of organizational identities: their definitions and their orientations. Adopting a case methodology with a grounded approach, and using semi-structured interviews and archival data, we studied a specialized higher education institution in India which is involved in the research and commercialization of biomedical innovations. We found that the effectiveness of their research commercialization efforts appeared to co-vary with how organizational identities were defined, while their efforts directed towards public or private goods appeared to co-vary with how organizational identities were oriented. We suggest a set of propositions for future studies. We also suggest that policies in this field need to account for how organizational identity impacts research into public goods in these economies and the need to encode policy changes in the organizational identities of universities.