This paper deals with the topic of related R&D and innovation strategies of large firms. We ask what determines the diversity of a firm's product portfolio. More specifically, we try to explain large firms' expansion into new product markets driven by the characteristics of their technological...

This paper empirically investigates the determinants of R&D diversification strategies in the drug industry. It enriches the existing literature by proposing to look at diversification factors, which reflect market and technological proximity of an R&D project towards other projects within a...

Research on intellectual property has focused on formal legally recorded rights that we call deeded, most often measured by granted patents. Meanwhile, other "defacto" IP (mainly purposive secrecy and natural excludability) has become more important because of the increasing closeness of...

In the paper technical efficiency of Russian plastic and rubber production firms in 2006–2010 is estimated by SFA. It is demonstrated that increasing firm size will cause increase in its efficiency and also there is increasing returns to scale in the sector. This result is robust for various...

This study shows that R&D cooperation can be used as an instrument to coordinate drug development portfolios among participating firms, which has crucial implications on the number of drugs offered on the market. Our study puts special attention to the fact that R&D cooperation, formed at...

We study size and growth distributions of products and business firms in the context of a given industry. Firm size growth is analyzed in terms of two basic mechanisms, i.e. the increase of the number of new elementary business units and their size growth. We find a power-law relationship...

Using the nonparametric approach of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), this paper examines firm’s heterogeneity in the Indian pharmaceutical industry by measuring their input and output efficiencies for the period 1991 to 2005. The analysis establishes that even though firms have been able to...

This study analyses 1400 research projects of the top 20 R&D-spending pharmaceuticals to identify the determinants of successful research projects. We provide clear evidence that externally sourced projects and projects involving biotechnologies perform better than internal projects and chemical...

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the...

We introduce a model of proportional growth to explain the distribution of business firm growth rates. The model predicts that it is exponential in the central part and depicts an asymptotic power-law behavior in the tails with an exponent ζ = 3. Because of data limitations, previous studies in...