Academic collaboration and organizational innovation: the development of research capabilities in the US pharmaceutical industry, 1927--1946*

Jeffrey L. Furman and Megan MacGarvie

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2009, vol. 18, issue 5, 929-961

Abstract: This article investigates the historical conditions that contributed to the birth of in-house research and development (R&D) capabilities in the early US pharmaceutical industry by examining qualitative and quantitative data on university--industry interaction between the 1920s and 1940s. This evidence suggests that labor markets, collaborative research, and contract research were the principal mechanisms by which early university science contributed to the development of in-house research capabilities in the emerging US pharmaceutical industry. This article further demonstrates a pattern in which firms with lesser R&D capabilities were generally constrained to work with local partners, while firms with greater internal R&D capabilities primarily engaged local partners for smaller-scale projects requiring generalist skills and distant partners for larger-scale efforts and extraordinary projects. We conclude by examining the implications of collaboration for those firms that did engage university academic partners. Our findings suggest that pharmaceutical firms that collaborated with universities during this period achieved higher rates of patenting and laboratory growth. Copyright 2009 The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/icc/dtp035 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:oup:indcch:v:18:y:2009:i:5:p:929-961

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial and Corporate Change is currently edited by Josef Chytry

More articles in Industrial and Corporate Change from Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().