Technology marketing: a new core competence of technology-intensive enterprises

Even in the area of technology, firms are increasingly contracting in from external sources, or contracting out their own work to third parties. This involves the areas of licensing, R&D cooperation, production and OEM briefs and commerce in technologically demanding components and part-products. The carrying out of such technology business, here christened "Technology Marketing", is dependent upon new processes and concepts, because known marketing methods do not sufficiently take into account the knowledge-defined uniqueness of technologies as the object of commerce. This paper is the result of a cooperative research study carried out by the ETH Centre for Enterprise Science (formerly BWI, Section for Technology and Innovation Management) and the Research Institute for Sales and Commerce of the University of St Gall.