New Challenges in Alliance Portfolio Management - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 165

5.5.3 Implications for Academia

In previous research, the pharmaceutical industry has proven to be a fertile ground
for research on external R&D, alliances, and technology licensing. The pharmaceu-
tical industry is a prototypical example of a science-based industry with both high
economic and societal values. Pragmatic concerns such as data availability undoubt-
edly helped trigger research in this industry. Also marketing scholars have become
increasingly interested in the pharmaceutical industry, which is a manifestation of a
widening interest domain that extends well beyond the “traditional” consumer
packaged goods industries. It is a positive development that for more than a decade,
marketing scholars have turned to the study of innovation in technology- and
science-based industries. This necessary expansion has also opened up the market-
ing fi eld to the study of new phenomena. This chapter covered one such phenome-
non, external knowledge sourcing. More than one and a half decades ago, Powell
et al. ( 1996 ) observed a change of the locus of innovation in the biopharmaceutical
industry from the individual fi rm to network constellations. While in the marketing
fi eld, alliance research was initially restricted to individual alliances, more recent
studies on interorganizational linkages in technology-intensive industries have
looked beyond the dyad (e.g., Wuyts et al. 2004a , b ; Yli-Renko and Janakiraman
2008 ).
The new challenges in managerial practice may guide academic scholars in for-
mulating research questions and seeking for empirical generalizations in portfolio
management. To tie back to the key role of portfolio diversity, it is noteworthy that
alliance diversity can be both a cause and a consequence of new opportunities.
While some studies looked into the emergence of alliance portfolios as a result of
business strategy (Hoffmann 2007 ), other studies looked into their consequences for
business strategy (e.g., Wuyts et al. 2004a ). The latter was also my perspective in
this chapter; rather than distinguishing cause from effect, however, we may want to
acknowledge and examine the dynamic iterative process between portfolio compo-
sition and business strategy to further advance this fi eld. This is only one possible
route to advance. New research avenues emerge also more directly from the topics
covered in this chapter, leading to new questions that hopefully future research will
investigate. I conclude with four such research questions:

- What is the optimal alliance portfolio composition, in light of the six dimensions

of alliance portfolio management identifi ed in Fig. 5.1 ? Addressing this question
requires a more integrative approach than prior research has offered.

- Do fi rm characteristics such as top management involvement and internal knowl-

edge creation processes help explain variation across fi rms in how much they
benefi t from alliance portfolio diversity? Addressing this question requires a
contingency perspective, which is uncommon in the alliance and network litera-
tures but fundamental to the strategy literature at large.

- Which other factors—such as alliance contractual specifi cations and portfolio

governance approaches—help explain variation across fi rms in how much they
benefi t from alliance portfolio diversity?