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Abstract: In today's dynamic global landscape, addressing modern challenges necessitates redefining and linking value chains across diverse industries. Horizontal knowledge and technology transfer (hKTT) between traditionally unrelated sectors is increasingly vital. To foster hKTT across distant industries, companies should actively collaborate with diverse partners. Establishing cross-sector alliances is key to enabling successful hKTT, yet many projects fail to materialize. Therefore, we conducted a multiple-case study involving qualitative expert interviews from the new space sector. Our goal is to identify barriers hindering effective hKTT through cross-industry alliances. Our findings are informing strategies for alliance formation to drive innovation and tackle global challenges, with implications for academia and policy. Companies and researchers can use our insights to understand and overcome specific hurdles in hKTT engagement, improving alliance-building and innovation collaboration strategies.
Keywords: Horizontal Technology transfer; Cross-industry innovation; Strategic Alliances Formation; New Space Industry.
1 Introduction
No discipline alone can solve today's grand challenges. Therefore, cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) is pivotal for the creation of science-based ventures, driving innovation, and addressing global challenges (Bengoa et al. 2021; Borge and Bröring 2020). Interdisciplinarity and KTT are the key mechanisms that trigger the phenomenon of convergence of hitherto disparate fields of science, technology systems, or entire industries (Maine, Soh, and Dos Santos 2015). KTT has two directions: vertical (vKTT) involves transferring knowledge from basic to applied research, with collaboration between university and industry at different stages of venture creation (Autio and Laamanen 1995; Perkmann and Walsh 2007), while horizontal (hKTT) implies technology (and knowledge, related to the given technology) exchange between actors operating in different industrial domains (fields) (Robert Grosse 1996). Hence, interdisciplinarity - understood as an activity that integrates knowledge and practices from two or more scientific fields (Borge et al., 2022; Huutoniemi et al., 2010) - provides the basis for hKTT between companies that are seeking novel technological solutions outside their origin industry.
While vKTT has gained significant attention in existing literature, exploring hKTT remains relatively underrepresented. This is striking given its pivotal role in innovation and new venture creation that resides at the intersection of disparate fields of science, technology, and industry (Bengoa et al. 2021; Franziska Kaiser, Wehking, and vorn Brocke 2021). Although interdisciplinary research generates highly novel findings (Raasch et...