This risk can be mitigated by receiving large up-front payments or from clauses such as fallbacks that enable a company to gain back rights when a deadline has not been met. If superiority is strategically important, buyers should recognize that a single transaction may be insufficient and that continued monitoring is necessary. Goal of parity, high certainty about winners. The idea is to make sure that your company does not get shut out. For instance, many companies have signed up for semi- or nonexclusive access to DNA chip technology from Affymetrix or for annotated database information from Incyte and Celera.
Competitors sometimes classify technologies differently.
In 1993, SmithKline Beecham formed an alliance with Human Genome Sciences to gain exclusive access to EST gene sequences. In contrast, Merck formed an alliance with researchers at Washington University in 1994 to sequence ESTs and make them publicly available. SmithKline Beecham's actions imply a perspective that early and exclusive access to ESTs would be a source of competitive advantage, while Merck's actions seem to imply that ESTs should not be a source of competitive advantage. Goal of parity, low certainty about winners. Many emerging technologies fall in this quadrant.