Acquiring R&D projects: who, when, and what? Evidence from antidiabetic drug development

Jan Malek, Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts and Reinhilde Veugelers

No 735739, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: This paper analyzes M&A patterns of R&D projects in the antidiabetics industry. For this purpose, we construct a database with all corporate individual antidiabetics R&D projects over the period 1997 - 2017, and add detailed information on firms’ technology dimension using patent information, next to their position in product markets. This allows us to identify the identity of targets and acquirers (who), the timing of acquisitions along the R&D process (when), and which type of R&D projects changes hands in terms of technology novelty (what). The main results can be summarized as follows. First, most of the action in M&As is in early R&D stages, still far from product markets. Second, most of the early-stage projects that change hands are high-risk/high-gain novel projects. Third, the industry leaders in the product markets are rather inactive in acquiring those novel early-stage projects. The likely acquirers of such projects are small or pipeline firms. Our results put in perspective the narrative that large incumbents acquire small targets with low-risk projects close to product launch.

Keywords: M&As; innovation; R&D; pharmaceutics; technology; novelty; patents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44
Date: 2024-02-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ino, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
Note: paper number MSI_2401
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report MSI_2401, pages 1-44

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/747648 Published version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Acquiring R&D projects: who, when, and what? Evidence from antidiabetic drug development (2024)
Working Paper: Acquiring R&D Projects: Who, When, and What? Evidence from Antidiabetic Drug Development (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:msiper:735739

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().