Market orientation in the context of knowledge intensive high technology SMEs – operationalizing the concept in biotechnology Track: Technology entrepreneurship

This paper reports on a qualitative research in which the main themes for understanding and operationalizing behavioural market orientation of technology based ventures in biotechnology have been identified. The research forms a basis for future quantitative research assessing the degree and performance implications of behavioural market orientation of knowledge intensive high technology SMEs. The research helps the managers of these firms in their attempts to develop more market oriented organizations. Executive summary Small and new high technology ventures are often described as technology focused, as opposed to being market oriented, and there is a call for a more market oriented approach in technology based new ventures. However, the current understanding of market orientation of an organization is based on research mostly conducted in an era of mass production, increasing consumption, excess supply over demand, and branding which has an impact on the generalizability of the current theoretical constructs. This paper reports on a qualitative research in which the main themes for understanding and operationalizing behavioural market orientation of technology based ventures in biotechnology have been identified. These themes include (1) understanding the development stage of the firm as well as the multiple stakeholders that constitute the customers of a firm, (2) taking into account the informal contacts of the entrepreneur(s), links to universities, industry associations, and both vertical and horizontal links to partner firms as sources of market intelligence, (3) intelligence dissemination in small firm context should not be limited to dissemination within the boundaries of one firm but within a network of actors, and (4) responsiveness to market intelligence in this context is often an interfirm phenomenon as well. Understanding these issues and operationalizing them in future research provides managers of small, knowledge intensive firms a better understanding of the nature and sources of market orientation in their organizations and helps them in developing more market oriented high technology ventures.