How Science Shapes Alliance Portfolios with General-Purpose Technologies: Evidence from Graphene

This paper examines how firms capture value from new general-purpose technologies (GPTs) via alliances. Due to GPTs’ wide downstream applicability, firms can tailor the industry breadth of their alliance portfolios, defined as the range of downstream industries it forms alliances in to introduce the GPT. However, firms face challenges in alliance formation as potential partners in each downstream industry face uncertainty relating to the technology and the GPT-producing firm. This paper demonstrates how the number of GPT-related market applications spanned by the firm’s scientific publications (i.e., “scientific market span”) is positively associated with the industry breadth of its alliance portfolio. The main proposition here is that scientific publications by GPT-producing firms can signal the generality of their technology and quality as alliance partners. This relationship is positively moderated by the firm’s scientific recombination. The empirical context is the emerging general-purpose technology, graphene.