Housing supply chain model for innovation: research report

The aim of this research is to undertake a case study analysis of successful delivery of an innovation to the Australian housing construction industry. This study is conducted on the “innovator group”; that is, the group that created the idea of an innovation for the housing sector and then were intimately involved in creation, development and diffusion. It is apparent that there were key players involved in this process which are representative of various organisations along the supply chain – designer, developer, subcontractor and supplier. Much rhetoric states that integration of the supply chain actors will solve construction problems, however, in reality we know little beyond this in the Australian context as there has been little research conducted previously. This study will examine in detail the process undertaken by this particular group to deliver an innovation to the housing sector which required an integrated construction supply chain model. This report was published by the Australian Housing Supply Chain Alliance and written by Professor Kerry London, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University with Research Fellow, Jessica Siva

Alliance Coordination, Dysfunctions, and the Protection of Idiosyncratic Knowledge in Strategic Learning Alliances

In high technology industries firms use strategic learning alliances to create value that can’t be created alone. While they open their interorganizational membrane to gain new skills and competences, generate new products and services, accelerate development speed, and enter into new markets their idiosyncratic knowledge base may be impaired when knowledge related dysfunctions like the unintended knowledge transfer, asymmetric learning speed or premature closing occur. Within a value approach we examine the interplay of alliance coordination activities that enhance value creation, emerging knowledge related dysfunctions, and formal and organizational protections measures which shall safeguard firms intellectual crown jewels. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 111 strategic alliances of young technology based Enterprises (YTBEs) with competing partners in high and key technology industries. Our findings suggest that a focal firm’s alliance management is well advised to intensely coordinate the alliance and to be aware of dysfunctional tendencies that erode alliance value. Since organizational protection measures could exaggerate dysfunctional effects they should be deployed very deliberately on a modest level. Formal protections measures, in contrast, seem to aggravate coordination activities’ value creation effect by setting behavioral guidelines. Moreover, an unsuccessful negotiation process of formal protection agreements may allow a deselection of partners that would not obey others intellectual property interests. Finally, we highlight theoretical and managerial implications that arise from these findings. --Strategic Learning Alliance,Protection

Appropriation of value in Biomedical research outcome at Public Research Organisations

Transactions on biomedical research outcomes bring into play strategies that are determined by leveraging resources into quasi-markets and on options based on expectations. To govern such transactions, the choice of appropriate governance structures and the governance of interaction are all too often in remittance of risk and uncertainty. Organisation and communities are prompted by issues concerning intellectual property (IP) to underwrite information, which is inherently fraught with difficulties of discerning ownership and quantifying qualitative business variables. Against that backdrop, we enquire on the mechanisms underpinning value dissipation and value appropriation of biomedical research outcomes to make proposition on the organisational antecedence to innovation. It is a preamble study with the view to developing a meso-level framework to describe mechanisms of value appropriation of upstream biomedical (non-invasive) research at Public Research Organisation. Its underpinning is largely based on the availability appropriability regimes and viability of organizational governance decisions and how the choice of organizational governance form affects both the creation and appropriation of economic value

Transitioning from Transaction-Based Markets to Alliance-Based Supply Chains: Implications for Firms

Industrial Organization,

Unbundling dynamic capabilities for inter-organizational collaboration

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore two distinct subsets of dynamic capabilities that need to be deployed when pursuing innovation through inter-organizational activities, respectively, in the contexts of broad networks and specific alliances. The authors draw distinctions and explore potential interdependencies between these two dynamic capability reservoirs, by integrating concepts from the theoretical perspectives they are derived from, but which have until now largely ignored each other – the social network perspective and the dynamic capabilities view. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate nanotechnology-driven R&D activities in the 1995–2005 period for 76 publicly traded firms in the electronics and electrical equipment industry and in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industry, that applied for 580 nanotechnology-related patents and engaged in 2,459 alliances during the observation period. The authors used zero-truncated Poisson regression as the estimation method. Findings The findings support conceptualizing dynamic capabilities as four distinct subsets, deployed for sensing or seizing purposes, and across the two different inter-organizational contexts. The findings also suggest potential synergies between these subsets of dynamic capabilities, with two subsets being more macro-oriented (i.e. sensing and seizing opportunities within networks) and the two other ones more micro-oriented (i.e. sensing and seizing opportunities within specific alliances). Practical implications The authors show that firms differ in their subsets of dynamic capabilities for pursuing different types of inter-organizational, boundary-spanning relationships (such as alliances vs broader network relationships), which ultimately affects their innovation performance. Originality/value The authors contribute to the growing body of work on dynamic capabilities and firm-specific advantages by unbundling the dynamic capability subsets, and investigating their complex interdependencies for managing different types of inter-organizational linkages. The main new insight is that the “linear model” of generating more innovations through higher inter-firm collaboration in an emerging field paints an erroneous picture of how high innovation performance is actually achieved

Pathways Across the Valley of Death: Novel Intellectual Property Strategies for Accelerated Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is stagnating. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all noted that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this Article, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would help move upstream academic research across the valley of death that separates upstream research from downstream drug candidates. By exchanging trade secrecy for contract-based collaboration, our proposal would both protect intellectual property rights and enable many more researchers to search for potential drug candidates

Strategic Development Trends in the World Pharmaceutical Industry

The main purpose of the paper is to research and evaluate the strategic development trends in the world pharmaceutical industry in the period 1996–2006.We aim to find that mergers and acquisitions prevail as a vital strategic development option in the world pharmaceutical industry. The research examines the exploratory hypothesis that the intensive globalization process, increased competitiveness and changed structure of competitors, strongly influence the consolidation development trends in the world pharmaceutical industry which result in an increased number of mergers and acquisitions. The intensive consolidation of the world pharmaceutical industry is a market driven process and conditioned by several strategic issues, such as lack of brand new products, increased competitiveness, fast globalization process, intensive global marketing and sales activities, changed structure of competitors, fight for global market shares and customers’ loyalty. There is clear evidence that the world pharmaceutical industry and market are both becoming more oligopolistic and monopolistic.world pharmaceutical industry, globalization, consolidation, mergers and acquisitions

An integrated core competence evaluation framework for portfolio management in the oil industry

Drawing upon resource-based theory, this paper presents a core competence evaluation framework for managing the competence portfolio of an oil company. It introduces a network typology to illustrate how to form different types of strategic alliance relations with partnering firms to manage and grow the competence portfolio. A framework is tested using a case study approach involving face-to-face structured interviews. We identified purchasing, refining and sales and marketing as strong candidates to be the core competencies. However, despite the company's core business of refining oil, the core competencies were identified to be their research and development and performance management (PM) capabilities. We further provide a procedure to determine different kinds of physical, intellectual and cultural resources making a dominant impact on company's competence portfolio. In addition, we provide a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to develop core competence further by forging a partnership alliance choosing an appropriate network topology