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The paper aims to take stock of China’s recent biopharmaceutical industry development by analyzing product innovation and changes in the firms’ product portfolios during the five-year period between 2012 and 2017.

The paper introduces a classification of biopharmaceutical products. By applying the classification to the product data of China’s drug regulator, the CFDA, it becomes possible to trace the developments within the sector by looking at changes in the number of firms within each subgroup and changes in the number of subgroups in which each firm is involved. The classification allows an evaluation of the latest product innovation achievements.

The paper demonstrates a mild shakeout of firms in the relatively long-existing domestic market segments, a trend toward more specialized product portfolios and an enduring prevalence of innovation strategies aimed at exploiting relatively unpopulated domestic market niches instead of pioneering entirely new products. Especially the capability of upgrading to second-generation protein therapeutics has become a key criterion for separating the wheat and the chaff in China’s domestic sector. The paper moreover points out the relevance of acquisitions as a corporate growth strategy.

The research does not consider complementary indicators, product pipelines in particular. Future research should compare patterns across emerging economies.

The paper is unique in using the CFDA database for systematic academic research on (bio)pharmaceutical innovation and in introducing a biopharmaceutical product classification to trace innovative activities and changes in corporate product portfolios over time.

Motivated by the huge potential of biosimilars in the near future and rapid growth of Iranian biosimilar producing firms in recent two decades, this paper aims to explore the positioning of these firms in biopharmaceutical value chain and their path of technological capability building to extract policy-relevant advice.

As part of a two-year research project, an online questionnaire was designed and sent to biopharmaceutical experts in Iran between May and October 2016. Respondents came from biopharmaceutical firms. Also, 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted to analyze the path of capability building in Iranian biosimilar-producing firms.

The findings show that Iranian biopharmaceutical firms (BPFs) are mostly concentrated on “pharmaceutical development,”, “drug manufacturing” and “ after-sales services’ activities.” The study also demonstrates that most BPFs in Iran are at the “assimilative” level of capability and a few of them have recently moved toward the “adaptive” level.

The findings show that Iranian BPFs are mostly concentrated on “pharmaceutical development,” “drug manufacturing” and “after-sales services” activities. The study also demonstrates that most BPFs in Iran are at the “assimilative” level of capability and a few of them have recently moved toward the “adaptive” level.

Flawless product launches are critical success factors for biopharmaceutical companies due to increasing financial and technological risks. Industry benchmarking is widely used for managing biopharmaceutical product launch planning. However, while industry benchmarking may achieve operational efficiencies, it results in copying competitors and incremental productivity improvements rather than breakthrough in marketing innovation. This study extends the biopharmaceutical marketing framework from internally focused industry benchmarking to external competency‐based benchmarking (CBB) to build innovative practices by focusing on outstanding capabilities in far reaching industries and organizations. Adopting a CBB approach can lead to creating significant sources of organizational energy and creativity in biopharmaceutical marketing campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to explore patterns as well as determinants of regional specialisation in China's biopharmaceutical industry. It identifies and characterizes different types of enterprises engaged in the biopharmaceutical sector in terms of their business organisation and regional set up.

Based on data compilations not yet employed in academic analysis as well as personal interviews in China, structural determinants and driving forces of development are analysed against the background of the innovation systems literature.

The geography of innovation in China's biopharmaceutical industry is determined by both, government policy and the strategic location decisions of entrepreneurs. While local‐government support of firm clustering has contributed to a dispersion of industrial activity throughout China, the firms” networks are spanning clusters. Effectively, domestic firms are turning into multi‐regional companies locating activities such as R&D and manufacturing at different clusters.

The paper adds to the literature in so far as it throws light on an until now under‐researched field of China's innovation system. It identifies the concept of multi‐regionalism among domestic non‐state enterprises as an important parameter for understanding success and regional distribution of the industry.

One of the major functions of marketing strategy is the proper positioning of the company in the sectorial value‐added chain, in order to create the best possible competitive advantage. This process is extremely important, especially for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), since any wrong decision can literally eliminate the company from the market. This paper attempts to analyse and present the strategic positioning process specific to small and medium‐sized biopharmaceutical firms in the UK. After discussing the specific characteristics of the value chain in the biopharmaceuticals sector, the paper presents the research methodology used to collect primary and secondary data. Data analysis leads towards a theoretical model that describes the stages and the factors influencing the strategic positioning of SMEs in the value‐added chain of the biopharmaceuticals sector.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the multinationality‐performance (M‐P) relationship in the context of US biopharmaceutical small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).

The study examines the M‐P relationship of SMEs from a single home country and in a specific industry.

The paper finds that geographic dispersion of both foreign subsidiaries and alliances affects SME performance negatively, albeit to a varying extent. Firm‐specific technological advantages alleviate the negative impact of geographic dispersion of both foreign subsidiaries and alliances, whilst firm‐specific marketing advantages mitigate the negative effect of only geographic dispersion of foreign alliances. The paper also addresses the direct and joint effects of firm‐specific advantages, country‐specific advantages, and the degree of internalization on SME performance systematically. Further, the results reveal some interesting differences between the venturing and the development stage of SME internationalization.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, there have been virtually no studies on the M‐P relationship which attempt to distinguish between subsidiary‐ and alliance‐based internationalization.

This paper empirically investigates the profit impact of externally sourcing technology through acquisition. Specifically, it questions whether biopharmaceutical acquirers benefit from taking over technologies which are pre-marketed more than those that have already been approved for market. This paper utilizes the resource-based view to determine that the decision depends on the relative value chains of the acquirer and target. We assert that companies with lower research and development (R&D) intensity than their targets benefit from acquisitions of pre-marketed drugs more than they would with marketed drugs because of a complementary combination of competitive assets. Estimations from the U.S. biopharmaceutical sector in the 1990s show that acquirers that take over pre-marketed drugs from targets with higher R&D intensity than themselves have post-acquisition returns between 2% and 11% higher than if they took over marketed drugs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether alliance portfolio R&D intensity contributes to biopharmaceutical firms' number of new product approvals and whether alliance portfolio R&D intensity is more positively related to the number of new product approvals for pharmaceutical firms than for biotechnology firms.

The paper employs a random effects Poisson regression model using panel data of 821 firm year observations for 146 biopharmaceutical firms operating in the USA. The robustness of results is also checked with additional analysis, provided in an appendix.

The results of this study show that the R&D intensity of firms' alliance portfolios is positively related to their new product introductions. It is also found that alliance portfolio R&D intensity has a more positive impact on the pharmaceutical segment of the industry's new product introductions than those of the biotechnology segment.

The authors develop and test theory about how the combined effects of two dimensions of alliance portfolio configuration (size and relationship strength) positively impact new product development. The authors propose a two dimensional alliance portfolio configuration measure, alliance portfolio R&D intensity. They combine the number of R&D alliances relative to the total number of alliances in the portfolio with the differential strength of ties associated with resource commitments required to source information from upstream and downstream alliances.

An ambiguous environment indicates how rules and interests may not be outspoken or clear. In an emerging industry sector, such ambiguity may follow from different sets of rules to adapt to, changes to these rules, and how various parties surrounding a firm act based on these rules and individual interests, interaction goals, and priorities. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss how a company balances its relationships with others to achieve strategic intentions in an ambiguous environment. Specifically, the paper focusses on innovation in the biopharmaceutical sector in Taiwan.

The empirical part of the paper is based on a single case study portraying multiple parties surrounding an innovative Taiwanese biopharmaceutical firm.

The paper points to how partner selection and interaction are highly affected by the ambiguous environment. Ambiguity leads to transactional exchanges on the domestic level, while the focal firm engages in collaborative, relational interaction with international parties to accomplish innovations.

The paper contributes to literature on company strategies in emerging sectors with its specific focus on innovation strategies, and how a company balances ways of interacting based on an ambiguous environment. To Asian management research, contributions include an in-depth description of company-level strategizing in Taiwan.

This study aims to explore the emergence and development of new industries, especially in the context of developing countries, by considering industry emergence and development as a large-scale institutional change or transition.

The authors conducted an inductive case study research on the emergence of the biopharmaceutical industry in a developing country. The data on the emergence and development of Iran’s biopharmaceutical industry during 1990 and 2018 were collected through semi-structured interviews, participation in meetings, visits to companies and analysis of archival texts. The data analysis was an inductive and iterative process.

In the emergence and development of the biopharmaceutical industry, there have been a few key agents, institutional entrepreneurs (IEs), in both the state and private sectors, who played main roles. Moreover, the most important type of knowledge which has been crucial for the decision-making of IEs has been informal, tacit and institutional knowledge. Furthermore, the authors identified a mechanism, inter-institutional circulation, as being most effective in the transfer of institutional knowledge among IEs.

The originality of this study is applying insights from institutional entrepreneurship and knowledge management literature to the extant literature on industry emergence and development.