Creative destruction and productive preemptive acquisitions

•We develop a theory of entrepreneurial innovation for entry and sale into oligopoly.•Inventions of higher quality are more likely to be sold under bidding competition.•Preemptive acquisitions by incumbents stimulate research by entrepreneurs.•Policies disfavoring innovation for sale over innovation for entry may be suboptimal.

We develop a model of entrepreneurial innovation for entry and sale into oligopolies suitable for welfare analysis. We show that the expected consumer welfare can be higher under commercialization by sale than under commercialization by entry despite increased market power in the product market. The reason is that when the quality of the invention is sufficiently high, preemptive bidding competition among incumbents drives the acquisition price above the entry value. Entrepreneurs who sell their inventions will then have a stronger incentive to develop high-quality inventions than entrepreneurs who aim at entering the product market. Incumbents are hurt by this creative destruction process ignited by the entrepreneurs and thus have an incentive to undertake research to block entrepreneurs' research activities. We show that incumbents' own research effort can reduce, but not eliminate, the entrepreneurs' incentives to innovate for entry or sale.

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