Exploitative and Explorative Learning as a Response to the TRIPS Agreement in Indian Pharmaceutical Firms

Dinar Kale and David Wield

Industry and Innovation, 2008, vol. 15, issue 1, 93-114

Abstract: The intellectual property regime forms an important part of any government's economic and industrial policies. It is an important regulatory instrument not only affecting industry and market structure but also influencing firm-level learning strategies, especially in knowledge-based industries like pharmaceuticals. Given its crucial role, the strengthening of patent laws as a result of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement presents a significant institutional change for developing country industry. This paper analyses Indian pharmaceutical firms' strategic response to the strengthening of patent law. The research in this paper shows that Indian pharmaceutical firms responded to anticipated disruptive regulatory change by developing competencies incrementally as well as radically. Ambidextrous capability development involved explorative investment in R&D to develop innovative product R&D competencies and in parallel also involved exploitative use of existing process R&D capabilities. This ambidextrous capability development has enabled Indian pharmaceutical firms to survive and compete with multinational corporation (MNC) pharmaceutical firms, showing other catch-up firms a different path of capability development.

Keywords: Innovation; learning; capability; pharmaceutical industry; R&D; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13662710701850725 (text/html)
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:taf:indinn:v:15:y:2008:i:1:p:93-114

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CIAI20

DOI: 10.1080/13662710701850725

Access Statistics for this article

Industry and Innovation is currently edited by Associate Professor Mark Lorenzen

More articles in Industry and Innovation from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().