Tough Road to Take: Collaboration in the Nanotechnology Sector

Nanotechnology companies have to engage in a large array of collaborative projects as the technology itself can be applied in a variety of sectors. This nature pushes companies to collaborate with other companies (and institutions) in a variety of industries to commercialize products that use nanotechnology. At this point of course, we need to ask ourselves as to what would be an effective corporate form as such collaborations would require a complex technology to be transferred across company boundaries and often from universities to companies. Ronald Coase exquisitely explains in his pathbreaking work as to how these boundaries between the markets and the firm are drawn based on efficiency. It is recently that we discuss these issues based on the characteristics of different industries related particularly to their knowledge assets. For companies that intend to commercialize nanotechnology, interdisciplinary collaboration in private markets has to be almost second nature. However, as mentioned above for the two or several companies with different organizational structures, different ways of handling the products and processes and different heuristics to collaborate might prove itself rather difficult. So pertaining to this fact what would be the best way to collaborate? Should two or more companies engage in long-term contracts, should they build a joint venture or could it be the case that licensing could solve the issue? As it turns out, the answer to this question may not be so simple, and in the case of nanotechnology industries, a wide array of institutional arrangements might be needed.