Business Strategies and University-Pharmaceutical Industry Collaboration

Abstract

The literature provides plenty of evidence that innovation is a key driver of corporate competitiveness. However, R&D involves many financial resources. Thus, a way to overcome firms’ financial constraints is to form partnerships and collaborations with universities, usually funded by public capital, to achieve strategic corporate objectives. Therefore, and considering that the pharmaceutical industry is the one that most depends on the results of R&D, this article is a case study of how a pharmaceutical company in the Centro region of Portugal, where there is already a health cluster, incorporated the collaboration with the university in its long-term business strategy. We employ a narrative analysis of the media news, to show the management capacity in dealing with numerous and continuous challenges of the present context to continue pursuing the company’s long-term goals. The results show that the corporate strategy is based on two main aspects, on the one hand, collaboration with the university aiming at technological differentiation and, on the other, on the flexibility of production to achieve long term growth. Our contribution to the literature on the subject is twofold. First, we introduce the specific case of the pharmaceutical industry and argue that geographical distance is important to establish collaborations with academia due to the nature of the research (human health) that relies greatly in labs with human experiments. Second, we identify and highlight the role of Innovation prizes and publishing agreements as part of a strategy to attract talents and gain access to innovation, and to retain and increase the number of customers, as well as to improve the company's notoriety and reputation.