Abstract
In response to the increasing number and breadth of innovation studies on the pharmaceutical industry, we mapped the literature to show the trends in recent research and to indicate areas for further research. In the first phase, we analyzed articles on the pharmaceutical industry published in innovation journals. We used these articles’ textual and citation data and applied hybrid cluster analysis. Three main clusters were produced based on the level of analysis innovation scholars had used to investigate the industry: macro, meso and micro. We describe the research topics within these clusters and show that, overall, innovation scholars increasingly focus on the meso-level, analyzing the relationships across different firms. This shift in interest toward the collaborative nature of drug discovery and development was also apparent in macro- and micro-level studies. To explore how this literature is used by scientists in the industry, our second phase involved analysis of the citing articles published in pharmaceutical journals. Using our findings, we propose research areas that can be further explored in order to create an engaged and better-integrated literature on pharmaceutical innovation.
Highlights
Innovation is an important issue for the pharmaceutical industry, especially with regard to bringing new drugs to the market (e.g. Achilladelis and Antonakis 2001; Bianchi et al 2011)
We decided on having three clusters as we find that this clustering provided a clear delineation between the different levels of analysis used by innovation scholars in studying the pharmaceutical industry
In our investigation of each topic, we looked at the following: (1) The number of articles in the cluster, (2) the number of citations within the innovation journals dataset; (3) the number of citations in pharmaceutical journals; (4) the median year of publication; (5) the average annual increase in the number of articles in the last 10 years, measured on the basis of the slope of the linear regression line where x is the year of publication and y is the number of articles published from 2009 to 2018; (6) the top keywords in the cluster extracted from the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) matrix; (7) the most-cited article within the dataset; and (8) the most-cited article by articles in the cluster in general
Summary
Innovation is an important issue for the pharmaceutical industry, especially with regard to bringing new drugs to the market (e.g. Achilladelis and Antonakis 2001; Bianchi et al 2011). In an earlier synthesis of the wider literature on innovation, Crossan and Apaydin (2010) found innovation to be both a process and an outcome related to the “production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value‐added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and establishment of new management systems.” While this is a useful starting point, such a broadly-defined construct overlooks issues that are of greater relevance to specific settings such as the pharmaceutical industry. Despite the variety of therapeutic targets and drug types, the need to ensure safety and treatment efficacy requires the same development cycle to be followed across the industry (Scannell et al 2012) Such homogeneity makes it relatively easier to compare innovation processes between firms. We introduce creative ways for innovation scholars to gain new insights into innovation theory and the pharmaceutical industry
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