Search results

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the main Intellectual Property (IP) protection strategies adopted in the R&D phases of a company operating in the bio-pharmaceutical industry, according to an open innovation (OI) approach.

In order to assess how R&D intensive firms adopt IP strategies during OI practices, this research uses a single case-study design. The case has been studied over an extended period of time (from 2008 to 2015), triangulating data and information by means of multiple interviews with different key informants and projects documents. The novelty of the research justifies the use of a single case study.

The study reveals how a mix of formal and informal tools for IP protection are used, with a final attempt to maintain control over different technological solutions during their validation process and profiting from stable R&D collaborations with research partners.

Limitations of the study relate to the single case study methodology as well as to some peculiarities of the analyzed company and of the Bio-Pharmaceutical industry.

Research managers could find some food for thought in the adoption of OI approaches for reducing costs and risks associated with technological uncertainty, with particular attention to the strategic role of IP rights.

Despite knowledge protection being widely recognized to be a critical issue for implementing OI approaches, how IP strategies should be used in the different phases of R&D is still debatable. Moreover, few empirical studies relate to the adoption of optimal combinations of IP tools in relation to the different R&D phases in such technology intensive industries as the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

The purpose of this research is to explain the financing dilemma of China's strategic emerging industries and improve their financing efficiency, seize the commanding heights of economic science and technology to provide theoretical support.

This paper selects the companies listed under strategic emerging industry during the period of 2010–2017 as the research object and used the data envelopment analysis method (DEA) to evaluate the financing efficiency of China's strategic emerging industries and selects the tobit analysis method to find out the factors affecting its financing efficiency.

The results show that the average financing efficiency of listed companies in strategic emerging industries between 2010 and 2017 is 0.7792, and the level of financing efficiency of strategic emerging industries is still at a low level. Among them, the bio-pharmaceutical industry and the energy-saving and environmental protection industry have the highest comprehensive level, and the high-end equipment manufacturing industry and the new energy industry have the lowest level of financing efficiency. Among the factors affecting the financing efficiency of strategic emerging industries, the asset-liability ratio, financial expenses and cash ratio and financing efficiency are negatively correlated, and the net asset income is positively correlated with the growth rate of the main business income.

This paper measures the financing efficiency of China's strategic emerging industries, then explores the influencing factors of the financing efficiency of strategic emerging industries and tries to provide important reference values for the improvement of the financing efficiency of China's strategic emerging industries at a practical level.

Collaboration with universities is an important innovation strategy for enterprises. However, currently very little research has focused on how such university-industry collaborative innovation activities should be managed. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper introduces the university-industry collaborative innovation practices of Zhejiang NHU Company in China. By using a case study as the method, this paper aims to illustrate the mechanism of university-industry collaborative innovation and how to manage the collaborative innovation activities efficiently.

Zhejiang NHU Company established a university-industry collaborative innovation link through three innovation platforms: the technology R&D center, the ZJU-NHU joint-research center, and the national engineer center. Zhejiang NHU Company manages its collaborative relationships with universities through this innovation network.

NHU Company managed the collaborative relationship efficiently with the institutions, representing an effective degree of university-industry collaborative innovation management.

The purpose of this paper is twofold to examine the factors that contribute to local bias of venture capital in China and to explore the relationship between local bias and performance of venture capital institutions.

Local bias was measured in line with the model developed by Cumming and Dai (2010). Regression techniques were performed for our long-term cross-sectional data to analyse the potential determinants of local bias. This is followed by the Probit model to test the relationship between local preference and successful exit.

The overall finding indicated that local bias in China increased over time. The stiff competition among venture capital institutions reduced local bias, but the enhanced innovation capabilities of a particular geographical area amplified local bias because of the knowledge spillover effect. Finally, the results suggested that venture capital institutions with less local bias enjoy a greater likelihood of making successful exits.

This study used successful venture capital exit as a proxy for venture capital institution’s performance because of the unavailability of information such as internal rate of return. Future research should try to adopt other way of measuring venture capital institution’s performance.

This study sheds light on the various possible causes of local bias that the policymakers need to be aware of. Despite the rapid rise of China’s venture capital market in recent years, venture capital institutions have yet to make inroads into the local high-tech industry. This study implies to the policymakers that to reverse this trend, they should formulate policies that foster the long-term performance of venture capital institutions, mitigate the severity of local bias and raise the competitiveness of the Chinese venture capital market.

Because of data limitations, there is currently lack of prior empirical research on local bias of Chinese venture capital institutions based on large-scale data. This study intends to fill the gap.

Innovation ecosystem is an emerging and popular concept in both academic and industrial circles. It offers a new perspective for enterprise strategy positioning. A business can create more value through a healthy innovation ecosystem. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors utilize a new triple-layer core-periphery framework to analyze Insigma Group’s multi-platform collaboration innovation ecosystem, in order to explore the architecture and heterogeneous functions inside an innovation ecosystem.

The authors illustrate the components and working mechanisms of the four platforms, which function as ideation, entrepreneurship, financing and investment, and innovation, inside Insigma’s innovation ecosystem in detail, and explain how they interact and collaborate toward a shared aim of the whole innovation ecosystem.

The innovation ecosystem is an emerging concept. In this study, the authors combined two existing analytical frameworks of innovation ecosystem, and proposed a triple-layer core-periphery framework, which enable us to analyze the heterogeneity inside an innovation ecosystem.

The authors discussed the role of government and its policies in shaping the innovation ecosystem at the enterprise level.

The authors believe that this paper provides a holistic study of Insigma’s innovation ecosystem. The triple-layer core-periphery framework can be used to study other enterprise innovation ecosystem in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the adoption of the open innovation paradigm in the bio‐pharmaceutical industry and investigate through which organisational modes (e.g. collaborations, in‐ and out‐licensing) open innovation has been implemented and how these modes are interwoven with the different phases of the drug discovery and development process. Open innovation is currently one of the most debated issues in management literature. Few contributions, however, have paid attention so far to systematically and longitudinally addressing the adoption of open innovation in a specific industry.

A two‐step research strategy has been adopted. First, a panel study of top industry representatives was organised to operationalise the concept of organisational modes of open innovation in the bio‐pharmaceutical industry. Second, the open innovation modes used by the first 20 pharmaceutical biotech firms worldwide have been documented over the period 2000‐2005 in the various phases of the drug discovery and development process.

A framework of analysis, establishing the relations between open innovation modes and the phases of the drug discovery and development process, has been developed and assessed in the industry, allowing the determinants of adoption of different modes and their managerial implications to be discussed and to relate them to the peculiarities of the biotech industry.

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on open innovation by representing one of the first attempts to systematically and longitudinally assess the extent and particularly the determinants of the adoption of open innovation in a specific industry.

The purpose of this paper is to study the differences in the internationalization process of firms from emerging economies and the impact of their international expansion related choices on the nature of technological innovations developed by these firms. Specifically, the authors compare two principal perspectives on internationalization – the incremental internationalization process (slow, gradually increasing commitments using greenfield investments to similar host countries) and the springboard perspective (aggressive, rapidly increasing commitments using mergers and acquisitions to advanced host countries).

Building on key differences between the incremental internationalization and springboard perspectives, the authors argue that differences in the speed and mode of entry, as well as the interaction between the mode of entry and location of internationalization, will lead to differences in the types of technologies (mature versus novel) developed by emerging economy firms. The authors examine the hypotheses using panel data from 1997 to 2013 on emerging economy multinationals (EMNEs) from the Indian bio-pharmaceutical industry.

The findings suggest that firms internationalizing at higher speeds and using cross-border M&As tend to have innovations in mature technologies. The interesting findings can be explained by the challenges faced by emerging economy firms in experiential learning and the assimilation of external knowledge. In addition, the authors find that internationalization to technologically advanced countries weakens the relationship between cross-border M&As and innovation in mature technologies, suggesting that direct learning from technologically advanced environments may help alleviate the assimilation challenges of cross-border M&As.

The authors advance literature on EMNE internationalization by comparing the impact of their choice of internationalization approaches (incremental internationalization or springboard approach) on their innovation performance. The authors contribute to literature on EMNEs that has focused on the determinants of internationalization by identifying the learning implications of internationalization. The authors contribute to the nascent stream of literature on the level of innovation and catching up by EMNEs by performing a fine-grained analysis of the nature of technology innovation.

The growing success of open innovation practices in many firms raises the question of whether such principles can be transferred for reinventing public sector organisations. A paradigm based on principles of integrated collaboration, co-created shared value, cultivated innovation ecosystems, unleashed exponential technologies and extraordinarily rapid adoption is the so-called Open Innovation 2.0. The development of this approach reflects the perception that the innovation process has evolved. This study aims to explore new ways to study healthcare networks as key tool for innovation creation and spreading, by deploying the emergent paradigm of Open Innovation 2.0.

The study investigates the impact of clusters, or localised networks, involving industrial, academic and institutional players, in the (bio)pharmaceutical setting; the aim is to enrich the line of inquiry into cluster-based innovation by applying a social network analysis (SNA) methodology, with the aim to provide new perspectives for recognising how the set of interactions and relationships in the (bio)pharmaceutical context can lead to higher levels of knowledge transfer, organisational learning and innovation spreading.

Starting from the top ten (bio)pharmaceutical companies, and the top ten contract research organisations (CROs), the study helps understand that: the combination of the single big pharma company and the CROs to which great part of the work is externalised, can be compared to a community of transaction that deals with the supply and demand of a specific kind of goods and services; clusters can comprise either a single one or more communities of transaction; virtual CROs act as a community whose all components participate to the creation of value (co-creation), thus comparable to a certain extent to a community of fantasy.

Based on the novelty of the OI2/SNA combination approach to deal with the “complex” (bio)pharmaceutical industry, the outcomes of the present study mean to highlight: a comprehensive perspective for understanding the dynamics of modularity and their implications for innovation networks; the presence of innovation networks as main mean to promote and support paths of knowledge creation and transfer.

Purpose – The cost of new drug development is increasing every year. Pharmaceutical companies use R&D joint ventures, mergers, and outsource different stages of pharmaceutical R&D activities for a faster and cost minimizing method of innovation. Pharmaceutical companies outsource R&D activities to independent small biotech or pharmaceutical companies that specialize in different stages of pharmaceutical R&D. This chapter examines the determinants of the payment structure of research contracts between large bio/pharmaceutical companies and specialized research firms.

Methods – Determinants of R&D contracts are analyzed using detailed R&D contract data between bio/pharmaceutical companies and independent research firms for 10 years. A multinomial logit model is used in order to understand the determinants of three different types of contracts; royalty contracts, fixed payment contracts, and the mixed contracts.

Findings – Under uncertainty, the likelihood of a royalty contract rises for the early stages of the research and with the patent stock of the research firm. It is more likely to observe both royalty and fixed payment if the pharmaceutical client has past contracts with the same research firm. The results also suggest that if Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is more stringent in any disease area in reviewing the new drug application, then the likelihood of signing pure royalty contract decreases.

Implications – Understanding the nature of R&D contracts and the effects of FDA's behavior on the pharmaceutical R&D contract is important because these contracts not only affect the cost of new drug invention but also the quality and the rate of invention.

Value – Results are useful for both the pharmaceutical companies and the economic/business researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of alliance experience in firm innovation; it argues that, while cumulative alliance experience has a marginally diminishing contribution to likelihood of firm innovation over time, frequent engagement in alliances and an expanding alliance portfolio inhabit an enhancing role. This reveals new dimensions to the role of alliance experience as an antecedent to firm learning in managing alliances and to the development of alliance capabilities.

The paper estimates a range of models identifying the relationship between alliance experience and firm innovation. The panel data sample captures the full range of firms active in the UK bio-pharmaceuticals sector during the early stages of its development observing them from 1991 to 2001. An exploratory case study analysis is employed to shed light on the nuanced factors linking frequent engagement in alliances to the development of practices for efficient alliance management.

The paper shows that cumulative alliance experience has a marginally diminishing contribution to likelihood of firm innovation over time, while frequent engagement in alliances and the ensuing expansion of alliance portfolios enhance firm innovation. The exploratory case analysis demonstrates a link between frequent engagement in alliances and the development of processes for alliance management that could collectively reflect alliance capabilities.

Contribution derives from a longitudinal analysis of an original panel data set that maps the UK bio-pharmaceuticals sector over the initial period of its development. The paper sheds light on factors that can compel firms to form alliance capabilities, and extends a currently thin body of work on the foundations and antecedents to alliance and alliance portfolio capabilities.