Benchmarking and visualising the knowledge base of pharmaceutical firms (1995-2009)

Abstract

The rise of biotechnology in the 1970s ushered in a change in innovation strategies in the pharmaceutical industry. The vertically-integrated company become more reliant on a distributed innovation structure in which large corporations integrate the knowledge generated by a network of actors, including small biotechnology firms and public research organisations. In this context, it is important for the players in the network to benchmark the knowledge base of pharmaceutical firms against their competitors in the industry, as well as against possible collaborators. In this paper we present a suite of interactive visualization techniques that help understand the relative positions of pharmaceutical firms, collaborators and past or prospective mergers and acquisitions.