An Empirical Study of Increasing Roles of Knowledge Brokers in Marketplace for Technology

In recent years, firms have increased their use of internal and external knowledge through intermediaries. Especially, knowledge brokers make a marketplace to freely interchange ideas and stay in the middle of technology transactions. They play a key role in matching buyers and sellers, also connecting and combining existing knowledge. The market with brokers could bring numerous benefits of the openness to both seller and buyer. For a seller perspective, it could be alternative means for monetizing their IPR assets by providing the open space to sell quickly and easily. For buyers, it could help to solve the problem of asymmetries of information and also provide market transparency through an equal opportunity. This paper focuses on two research questions. First, knowledge brokers could make the transaction for technology possible and technologies liquid in a marketplace. Second, this paper will discuss today individual inventors. To do so it, we study IP auctions as one case of knowledge brokers. In our paper, we show technology marketplace could be a solution to challenges for Open innovation by providing financial incentives. It also could make individual inventors one of the essential contributors. Second, we identify the key determinants of bids by using a result of IP auctions. Relevance, the scope of patents and other factors suggested by literatures have an impact.