Zeynep Erden

The publishing and patenting strategies of successful university spinoffs in the biopharmaceutical industry

Firms in the biopharmaceutical industry send signals to investors about the value of their knowledge by disclosing it in the form of patents and publications. In this way, they can gain reputation even before having products on the market. This paper compares the patenting and publishing activities of university spinoffs with other biopharmaceutical firms. The findings suggest that successful university spinoffs and successful other firms (not university spinoffs) tend to follow different knowledge disclosure strategies. Whereas successful university spinoffs tend to emphasize the scientific value of their knowledge and gain reputation through their high-quality publications, other successful firms tend to emphasize the commercial value of their knowledge and gain reputation through high-quality patents.

Clusters in the biopharmaceutical industry: toward a new method of analysis

Clusters are groups of co-located and interconnected firms and institutions linked by commonalities in their strategies and complementarities in their activities and resources. There are several reasons for the geographical clustering of firms in the biopharmaceutical industry. This review unpacks some advantages and disadvantages of cluster participation, and proposes a new method to enable managers and researchers to identify clusters in the biopharmaceutical industry.

Rethinking leadership in drug discovery projects

Great efforts have been dedicated to rebuilding the engine of pharmaceutical R&D. However, one potential area of improvement has received limited attention in the literature and in practice: namely, leadership. In this article, we enrich the traditional views of leadership, which consider leadership a responsibility of a few centrally placed authorities, with the concept of distributed leadership. Distributed leadership reflects a group-based capability driven by everyday activities and the key scientific questions at hand. We identify three leadership challenges faced by R&D teams that could be addressed by implementing distributed leadership. Furthermore, we provide some suggestions as to how to foster distributed leadership in drug discovery projects.