Download working paper hbs faculty Pages download.aspx name .pdf pdf The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R D Laboratories By Lazzeri Francesca and Gary P. Pisano ABSTRACT—Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm s capacity to assimilate and use know how from external sources what Cohen and Levinthal called absorptive capacity plays a central role in innovation performance.
In recent years a common strategy pursued by companies to increase their absorptive capacity has been to locate new R D facilities in close geographic proximity to technology hotspots like Cambridge Massachusett s or Chinese Overseas America Number Data the San Francisco Bay Area. Such a strategy is predicated on the assumption that geographic proximity facilitates absorption. Unfortunately more than two decades after the publication of piece on absorptive capacity precious little is known about how different organizational strategies and managerial practices including location choices actually impact a firm s ability to exploit external sources of know how. A key barrier to empirical progress on this front has been a lack of direct measures of absorption. In this paper we develop a novel measure of absorptive capacity that attempts to directly track the influence of external sources of know how on the internal R D activities of individual laboratories.
We then use this measure to examine laboratory level differences in absorptive capacity and the degree to which a lab s geographic proximity to a given knowledge base influences its absorptive capacity. To identify patterns of absorption we exploit a quasi natural experiment that has occurred in the pharmaceutical industry over the past two decades. Since a number of major pharmaceutical companies Merck Novartis Pfizer etc. have chosen to locate new laboratories in one or more major life science hotspots Massachusetts the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego County.
發表於 2024-3-12 14:33:17
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