Vicarious learning in licensing-out: Exploring the opportunities available to the licensor

Why should companies engage in licensingout? While conventional wisdom mostly focuses on the financial and commercial benefits available to the licensor, this paper points to the learning opportunities entailed in licensing agreements. We develop an exploratory study and analyze a dataset of 433 deals. We identify all cases in which two parties invert their roles in a second licensing round, as a result of the vicarious learning opportunities exploited by the licensor; and we compare this subsample with all the licensorlicensee dyads in which the licensor never licenses back a technology from its initial licensee. Preliminary results are consistent with a learning scenario, thus prompting further empirical research.