R&D internationalisation patterns in the global pharmaceutical industry: evidence from a network analytic perspective

Abstract

This study adopts a Social Network Analysis (SNA) perspective to investigate global R&D internationalisation patterns of the pharmaceutical industry. We use co-inventorships identified in pharmaceutical patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 1996 and 2013, giving rise to an international collaboration network by drawing a cross-country link when a patent lists at least two inventors located in different countries. We describe changing R&D internationalisation patterns by exploring network structures as a whole as well as the changing role of different countries. The results show that R&D internationalisation indeed has gained momentum in pharmaceutical innovation, in particular after the year 2006. The network has developed from a mono-centric, star-like network – with the USA constituting the only hub – to a more distributed and dense network. The relative decline of the USA has not taken place at the expense of emerging economies but at the expense of European countries.

Keywords:

• R&D networks
• pharmaceutical industry
• social network analysis

Acknowledgements

We thank Mr. Junling Deng for his assistance in the preliminary data processing and the University of Macau for financial support for this research by the project MYRG119(Y1-L3)-ICMS12-HYJ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yuanjia Hu is Assistant Professor of State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau (UM). Dr Yuanjia Hu received his B.Sc. (2001) from the School of International Pharmaceutical Business, China Pharmaceutical University (CPU), UM-CPU dual M.Sc. in Medicinal administration (2004), and Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences (2009) from the UM. Prior to working at the UM, he visited the Austrian Institute of Technology and Peking University as guest researcher. His major research interests are pharmaceutical R&D internationalisation, R&D networks, and pharmaceutical patents and technology management. His work has been published in diversified major international journals including PLoS ONE, Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Patents, and Regional Studies.

Thomas Scherngell joined the Innovation Systems Department of AIT in December 2007. He holds a venia docendi (Habilitation) in Economic Geography and Regional Science, received from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2012. He received his M.A. in Economic Geography (2003) from the University of Vienna (Mag. phil.), and his Ph.D. (2006) from the same university (Dr rer. nat). Prior to working at AIT, Thomas Scherngell was a full-time university assistant at the Department of Economic Geography and GIScience at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (2002–2007). He also held a postdoc fellowship at the University of Macau, China (2012–2013). He is an expert in economics of innovation and technological change as well as in regional science and spatial analysis. Over the past five years, Thomas' research focus was on the structure and dynamics of R&D networks, with a special focus on networks constituted under the heading of the European Framework Programmes (FPs). Furthermore, he has been working extensively on spatial analysis methods, with a special emphasis on spatial econometric methods and spatial interaction modelling, and on network analysis methods, including Social Network Analysis (SNA) and methods from statistical physics. His research has been published and cited in major international journals. He is member of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), and reviewer for leading international journals including Science, the Journal of Economic Geography, Papers in Regional Science, and Geographical Analysis.

Lan Qiu is a Ph.D. candidate majored in Biomedical Sciences in the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS) at UM. She received her M.A. in Finance (2005) from the Sun Yat-sen University, and M.A. in Medicinal Administration (2006) from UM. She is a full-time lecturer at the International Business Faculty in Beijing Normal University (Zhuhai Campus) since 2006. Her research focuses include innovation, investment, and finance in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as medicinal administration and capital market. Her research has been published in various Chinese and international journals.

Yitao Wang is the founding Director of the Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences (ICMS) at UM since 2002. He is also the director of the State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine (UM) and the director of International Research Center for Medicinal Administration (Peking University). He received his B.Sc. in Medicine (1982) from Chengdu University of Chinese Medicine and his postgraduate degree in Pharmacology (1986) from Chongqing Medical University. Prior to working at the UM, he served as a professor and academic head at numerous higher education institutions of Chinese medicine (CM) as well as biomedical institutions, including Chengdu University of Chinese Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. He is known as an expert of innovation and international development of CM. His research focuses include key techniques of quality control and evaluation of CM, active therapeutic compounds and products of CM, medicinal administration, and international development of CM. He has published more than 10 academic books as well as more than 100 papers in high-impact international journals.

Notes

1. The European Union (EU), the WHO, the ICH, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Global Cooperation Group (GCC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) are all prompting the globalisation of pharmaceutical regulatory standards.

2. The random graph in this study is produced by means of the well-known Erdös-Renyi conceptualisation of random graphs (see Erdős and Rényi 1959) using the same number of nodes (n = 26) as in the network of co-inventorships. The properties of such a random graph are in general similar to properties of different scale-free real-world social networks, as for instance with respect to their small world character (see Watts and Strogatz 1998; Newman 2010).

3. Closeness centrality would be an alternative measure here. It is defined as the inverse of the mean geodesic distance (i.e., the mean length of the shortest path) from this vertex to every other vertex in a connected graph.