earticle

영어

When an innovator introduces its technology for system goods into a market with network externality, it can adopt various licensing strategies: a monopolist for an entire system using this proprietary technology, or for only a set of parts, or one of many firms in a competitive market by licensing (opening) all of its technology to others. Regarding the choice of these strategic options, there have been two seemingly conflicting schools of thought. Network externality theory encourages the innovator to open its technology fully so as to benefit from increased compatibility, while the leverage theory recommends the innovator to withhold proprietary technology fully in order to avoid future competition. Some historical examples, such as IBM and Apple in PC platform competition, suggest that neither of these extreme measures results in business success. With salient attention to the Resource-Based View, we develop a model to integrate these two perspectives. Our results suggest that while network externality encourages firms to open technology to a limited extent, they should keep the “core” technology to themselves in order to minimize future competition.