The Influence of Structural Holes on the Corporate Performance and Strategic Alliances Network in Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

Pharmaceutical companies have carried on active strategic alliance to encourage new medicine devel-opment and innovative development in the situation in which R&D productivity is continuously decreasing. Nevertheless, the research on strategic cooperation influencing on R&D productivity of pharmaceutical com-pany such as alliance and M&A, is limited, especially in respect of a network analysis. Therefore, this re-search is going to look at how the performance of corporation is affected by strategic alliance from the net-work analysis. Many researches use the density of network as the method of measuring the effect of network but this research progresses the analysis by focusing on structural holes. Especially, in case of the corporations in structural holes, they can get the not overlapped information and resources, so they have potential power for creating value. First, this research analyses strategic alliance network through network analysis and look at the role of corporations for acquiring information. Second, after analyzing the characteristics of strategic alliance be-tween pharmaceutical corporations by deriving an indicator of network structural holes, this research is going to examining how the structural holes influence the performances of corporations.