Many organizations commit large amounts of resources to maintain their competitiveness through innovative activities. How do they ensure that those resources are allocated to the uses that are most likely to yield innovations? Answering this question is the focus of a study that I, along with several other researchers, recently conducted in the biotech industry. (A full description of the study was published in the November 2008 issue of Strategic Organization.)

In this research, my coauthors and I set out to explore the interdependencies between various factors that may impact innovation success — and whether or not those factors work effectively together to help foster greater innovation. In particular, we researched the relationship between a company’s intellectual capital (what the organization knows through its codified patents), human capital (the proportion of the company’s scientific staff that consists of star scientists, as measured by prior innovation success) and collaborative capital (the company’s alliance portfolio and capabilities of working with others).

We used data from 843 biotech companies founded between 1973 and 1999; during this period, the companies collectively generated about 9,000 patents. Analysis of the... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.