Search

Asia is becoming a centre of gravity for global business. As a result of this, there is a growing interest in investment in this area, and pharmaceutical companies are not an exception. The old research and development investment model of the Western Big Pharma companies is starting to fall apart with the well-publicised reduction of new chemical entities productivity. Big Pharma is rethinking its business opportunities. Today, 88 per cent of the world's pharmaceuticals are shared between only 18 per cent of the world's population, which means that 82 per cent of the world's population has access to only 12 per cent of the world's pharmaceuticals. This presents a unique business opportunity for those that can seize the moment. Within this context, we are witnessing the use of different strategies by pharmaceutical companies. Some Big Pharma companies have a generic strategy, some have a developing world strategy, some have an outsource strategy and others have all three. The current mergers and acquisitions of pharmaceutical companies in India portray these structural profound changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge Management (KM) has played a critical role in innovation and technology management-related fields over the past decades. Most KM studies investigate related issues from the perspectives of an organisational or firm-to-firm level. Many firms create and sustain their innovativeness and capability via their counterparts within and across the industry, and their KM activities occur at the industrial level. The members of the KM activities may include firms, research and academic institutes, governments, and even their competitors and clients. This study takes industry as the knowledge base and explores the content of Industry-based Knowledge Managements (IKM) and how it is practiced in Asia. IKM is classified as four modes — knowledge clustering, enlarging, exchanging, and initiating. Some practical IKM cases in Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan are reviewed to verify the model and to clarify the IKM contents of each mode. Suggestions and directions toward IKM practices and research for the future are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]