The effect of technology commercialization competence on competitive advantage: The moderating role of market orientation

In the prevailing competitive environment among software companies, these companie's success in achieving competitive advantage seems unlikely without investing on new ideas and technologies. The process of capturing new ideas, technology development, transforming ideas into products using technology, and offering them to the market, is called technology commercialization. Technology commercialization may not lead to competitive edge without considering customer as the heart of firm attention that indicates the concept of market orientation. Therefore, this paper investigates whether technology commercialization competence has effect on competitive advantage with moderating role of market orientation in five software companies. For this purpose, a descriptive method is used and 130 questionnaires are distributed between managers and employees of these five software companies chosen by simple random sampling. To analyze data, structural equation modeling with partial least squares by Smart PLS 3 software is used. The results show that technology commercialization competence has positive and significant effect on differentiation and cost advantages with 0.526 and 0.679 path coefficient values, respectively. The results also show that market orientation has a moderating role in the relationship between technology commercialization competence and differentiation advantage with 0.491 path coefficient value.