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Business to business services: multiple markets and multi-disciplinary perspectives for the twenty-first century
Edited by Katherine Tyler, Mark Patton, Marco Mongiello and Derek Meyer
An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this issue.
Introduction
Business-to-business relationships have emerged as a central theme in marketing research, reflecting their importance and strategic potential. Indeed, the area of relationship marketing (RM) has now grown into an established stream, closely interwoven with the services marketing area. However, while an understanding of business-to-business service relationships has developed over time, this research has focused on relationships between private sector organisations. RM research has examined differences between relationship partners on a national culture basis ([1] Ahmed et al. , 1999; [63] Johnston et al. , 1999). However, relationships spanning fundamentally different organisational environments and corporate cultures have largely been neglected. In order to address this gap, this article identifies research-oriented university-industry relationships (UIRs) as a highly topical research context.
Given the increasing need of organisations for innovation in competitive, fast-moving marketplaces around the world, research customers provide a highly relevant services business market. Research services are anchored in vast pools of knowledge, capabilities and facilities and may take on a number of forms due to the diversity of research areas and methods accumulated at universities. They all encompass one characteristic, namely the need for a close interaction between the research providers and customers to enable the transfer of knowledge and research, indicating a need for a relational approach. Nevertheless, research services are yet to receive attention from RM or services marketing researchers. Despite the increased relevance of UIRs, the technology transfer literature has retained a largely transactional, rather than relational, perspective. Hence, research is required not only to develop a theoretical foundation but also to inform management seeking to develop successful UIRs.
The paper is organised as follows. First, the areas of business-to-business service relationships and technology transfer are reviewed, followed by a discussion of the concepts included in this study. Relationship success, key drivers and relevant antecedents are then described and propositions developed. Following this, a conceptual model and related hypotheses are presented. An outline of the methodology is then presented before the results are described, including a path analysis and hypotheses test,...