Search

This paper explores how and why collaboration with different types of partners and the position within a research network can affect firms' innovative performance in terms of product innovations. A detailed empirical analysis is carried out in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. This industry is characterized by a rapidly developing, complex, and dispersed knowledge base, where one would expect positive benefits from collaboration and the position within a network for innovative output. The paper uses a unique dataset in pharmaceutical cancer research based on scientific co-publications and new drug approvals. We apply social network analysis and count data regressions. We observe that collaboration with a diverse set of partners from academia and the network position in terms of eigenvector centrality is positively related to product innovation. However, we do not find a general positive association between collaboration, particularly with biotechnology companies, and product innovation or between central network positions and product innovation. Therefore, these results require a re-assessment of the role of scientific collaboration and biotechnology companies in the development of the pharmaceutical industry.

Recent empirical contributions emphasize the importance of (potential) market size for the development of new pharmaceuticals. At the same time many scholars point out the importance of of scientific advances for the industry's R&D activities. Against this background I analyze the relationship between (potential) market size, technological opportunities, and the number of new pharmaceuticals in the United States. Technological opportunities are operationalized as growth rates of the relevant knowledge stock as proposed by Andersen (1999, 1998). I analyze a unique dataset by using an entry stock Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimator. The results reveal a rather robust and significantly positive response of the number of new pharmaceuticals, i.e., new molecular entities or new drug approvals, to market size and technological opportunities.

Knowledge production and scientific research have become increasingly more collaborative and international, particularly in pharmaceuticals. We analyze international research networks on the country level in different disease groups. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of scientific publications related to pharmaceutical research. Using social network analysis, we find that both the number of countries and their connectivity increase in almost all disease groups. The cores of the networks consist of high income OECD countries and remain rather stable over time. We use network regression techniques in order to analyze the dynamics of the networks. Our results indicate that an accumulative advantage based on preferential attachment and point connectivity as a proxy for multi-connectivity are positively related to changes in the countries' collaboration intensity.

In this paper we focus on proximity as one of the main determinants of international collaboration in pharmaceutical research. We use various count data specifications of the gravity model to estimate the intensity of collaboration between pairs of countries as explained by the geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and cultural dimensions of proximity. Our results suggest that geographical distance has a significant negative relation to the collaboration intensity between countries. The amount of previous collaborations, as a proxy for social proximity, is positively related to the number of cross-country collaborations. We do not find robust significant associations between cognitive proximity or institutional proximity with the intensity of international research collaboration. Moreover, there is no robust and significant relation between the interaction terms of geographical distance with social, cognitive, or institutional proximity, and international research collaboration. Our findings for cultural proximity do not allow of unambiguous conclusions concerning their influence on the collaboration intensity between countries. Linguistic ties among countries are associated with a higher amount of cross-country research collaboration but we find no clear association for historical and colonial linkages.