Measuring Competence? Exploring Firm Effects in Pharmaceutical Research
利用10家大型制药公司的项目级内部数据，区分组件能力和架构能力，发现两者共同解释了企业间研究生产力的显著差异，并探讨了能力的本质及其随时间扩散的方式。
Renewed interest in the resource-based theory of the firm has focused attention on the role of heterogeneous organizational ‘competence’ in competition. This paper attempts to measure the importance of these effects in the context of pharmaceutical research. We distinguish between ‘component’ and ‘architectural’ competence, and using internal firm data at the program level from 10 major pharmaceutical companies show that together the two forms of competence appear to explain a significant fraction of the variance in research productivity across firms. Our results raise some intriguing questions about the nature of competencies and the ways in which they diffuse over time.