The Impact Of Inward Licensing On New Venture’s Performance. Is inward licensing a winning strategy?

The original idea of the thesis draws on interrelated assumptions: 1) among the tools used, in the markets for technology, for the acquisition of external knowledge, the licensing agreements are acknowledged as one of the most important contractual mechanisms; 2) the liabilities of newness and the liabilities of smallness force new venture to strongly rely on external knowledge sources. Albeit the relevance of this topic, little attention has been paid so far to its investigation, especially in the licensing context; 3) nowadays there is an increasing trend in licensing practices, but the literature on markets for technology focuses almost exclusively on the incentives and rationales that foster firms’ decisions to trade their technologies, under-investigating the role of the acquiring firm, the licensee, overlooking the demand side of the market. Therefore, the thesis investigates the inward licensing phenomenon within the context of new ventures. The main questions that new venture licensee has to address if it decides to undertake an inward licensing strategy, can be summarized as follows: 1) Is convenient for a new venture to choose, as initial technology strategy, the implementation of an inward licensing ? 2) Does this decision affect its survival probabilities? 3) Does the age, at which a new venture becomes a licensee, affect its innovative capabilities? Is it better to undertake a licensing-in strategy soon after founding or to postpone this strategy until the new venture has accumulated significant resources? The findings suggest that new ventures licensees survive less than their non-licensee counterparts; the survival rates are directly connected to the time taken by firms to reach the market;being engaged in licensing-in deals some years after its inception allows a new venture licensee to increase its subsequent capacity to produce innovations.

Original analytical methods for the determination of psychoactive compounds in complex matrices

This thesis work aims to develop original analytical methods for the determination of drugs with a potential for abuse, for the analysis of substances used in the pharmacological treatment of drug addiction in biological samples and for the monitoring of potentially toxic compounds added to street drugs. In fact reliable analytical techniques can play an important role in this setting. They can be employed to reveal drug intake, allowing the identification of drug users and to assess drug blood levels, assisting physicians in the management of the treatment. Pharmacological therapy needs to be carefully monitored indeed in order to optimize the dose scheduling according to the specific needs of the patient and to discourage improper use of the medication. In particular, different methods have been developed for the detection of gamma-hydroxybutiric acid (GHB), prescribed for the treatment of alcohol addiction, of glucocorticoids, one of the most abused pharmaceutical class to enhance sport performance and of adulterants, pharmacologically active compounds added to illicit drugs for recreational purposes. All the presented methods are based on capillary electrophoresis (CE) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled to various detectors (diode array detector, mass spectrometer). Biological samples pre-treatment was carried out using different extraction techniques, liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and solid phase extraction (SPE). Different matrices have been considered: human plasma, dried blood spots, human urine, simulated street drugs. These developed analytical methods are individually described and discussed in this thesis work.