Innovation networks and competitive coalitionsin the pharmaceutical industry: The emergenceand structures of a new industrial organization

Abstract

Today, the pharmaceutical industry is subjected to wide-scale technological, institutional and economic changes that bring about a radical reconfiguration of the structural parameters and strategic variables of competition. While innovation processes are being increasingly structured around a new paradigm and markets are being both globalized and fragmented, firms are attempting to adapt, above all by refocusing their businesses and by redefining all the links in their value chain. However, the most significant changes in their strategy lie in the conception of their horizontal and vertical relations. The competitive game has a tendency to being extended to phases upstream market competition, to be reconfigured in the form of intra and inter-coalitions and networks strategic games, and to quickly evolve along with technological innovations, the opening of new market "frontiers" and successive concentration operations. The pharmaceutical industry thus constitutes a sort of life-size "laboratory" for an in-depth analysis of the effects of radical institutional and technological changes on the new shapes of competitive structuring within markets undergoing rapid globalization, and of the "spontaneous" emergence of a new form of industrial organization.