In order to succeed, technology ventures need to find a profitable market application for their technology. Although external market actors may provide important information for the identification and validation of potential technology-market combinations, it remains largely unclear how technology ventures can involve them in this process. Building on insights from organizational search literature, this study follows five university spin-offs trying to commercialize early-stage technologies. We find that ventures are cognitively constrained in proactively identifying and approaching external market actors. Interestingly, the better performing ventures in our sample engage in a previously undocumented market search process we label Technology Broadcasting. They communicate their technological competencies to a broad range of market actors and react to these actors' assessment and spontaneous expressions of interest, thereby overcoming their own cognitive constraints. Resource constraints require filtering these expressions of interest through Systematic Validation with additional market players. These results complement the existing insights on market search by entrepreneurial ventures and advance the literature on organizational search.

为了取得成功，技术企业需要为其技术找到有利可图的市场应用。尽管外部市场参与者可能为识别和验证潜在的技术市场组合提供重要信息，但在很大程度上仍不清楚技术企业如何让他们参与这一过程。本研究以组织搜索文献的见解为基础，追踪了五所试图将早期技术商业化的大学附属公司。我们发现企业在主动识别和接触外部市场参与者方面受到认知限制。有趣的是，我们样本中表现较好的企业参与了我们标记为 Technology Broadcasting 的先前未记录的市场搜索过程。他们将自己的技术能力传达给广泛的市场参与者，并对这些参与者的评估和自发的兴趣表达做出反应，从而克服自己的认知限制。资源限制需要通过与其他市场参与者的系统验证来过滤这些兴趣表达。这些结果补充了创业企业对市场搜索的现有见解，并推进了有关组织搜索的文献。