
Iain M. CockburnBoston University | BU · Questrom School of Business
Iain M. Cockburn
PhD
About
105
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Introduction
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July 1999 - present
July 1990 - present
July 1989 - July 1999
Publications
Publications (105)
What are the origins of competitive advantage? Although this question is fundamental to strategy research, it is one to which we lack a clear answer. As strategy researchers we believe that some firms consistently outperform others, and we have some evidence consistent with this belief. We also have a number of well‐developed theories as to why, at...
Low reproducibility rates within life science research undermine cumulative knowledge production and contribute to both delays and costs of therapeutic drug development. An analysis of past studies indicates that the cumulative (total) prevalence of irreproducible preclinical research exceeds 50%, resulting in approximately US$28,000,000,000 (US$28...
Patents have long been considered essential incentives to foster innovation, particularly the development of new prescription drugs, due to the lengthy, costly, and risky nature of the research and development (R&D) process as compared to the lower levels of investment and risk associated with generic drug entry. Compared with other forms of intell...
:This paper studies how patent rights and price regulation affect how fast new drugs are launched in
different countries, using newly constructed data on launches of 642 new drugs in 76 countries for
the period 1983-2002, and information on the duration and content of patent and price control regimes.
Price regulation strongly delays launch, while...
The pricing and accessibility of patent-protected drugs in low- and middle-income countries is a contentious issue in the global context. But questions about price have little meaning if a drug is not available for purchase, and the extent to which patent policy affects when (and if) new drugs become available in these countries has largely been ov...
We study the impact of small firms on innovation in regions where large labs are present. Small firms generate demand for specialized services that lower entry costs for others. This effect is particularly relevant in the presence of large firms that spawn spin-outs caused by innovations deemed unrelated to the firm’s overall business. We examine M...
Using novel survey data on technology licensing, we report the first empirical evidence linking the three main sources of failure emphasized in the market design literature (lack of market thickness, congestion, lack of market safety) to deal outcomes. We disaggregate the licensing process into three stages and find that although lack of market thi...
We estimate hedonic price indexes for clinical trial research, an important component of biomedical R&D, using a large sample of agreements between trial sponsors and clinical investigators obtained from MediData Solutions Worldwide Inc. Nominal prices measured as total grant cost per patient rose by a factor of 4.5 between 1989 and 2011, while the...
Location possibilities for biopharmaceutical firms are expanding, driven by factors such as falling natural and political barriers to trade and communication, extension and strengthening of patent protection through institutions including theWorld Trade Organization, and growing supplies of skilled labor and related infrastructure in large, relativ...
Large labs may spawn spin-outs caused by innovations deemed unrelated to the firm's overall business. Small labs generate demand for specialized services that lower entry costs for others. We develop a theoretical framework to study the interplay of these two localized externalities and their impact on regional innovation. We examine MSA-level pate...
Rising R&D expenditures and falling counts of new drug approvals since 1996 have lead many observers to conclude that there has been a sharp decline in research productivity in the pharmaceutical industry over the past decade. A close look at the underlying data, however, suggests that these trends are greatly exaggerated: properly measured, resear...
We examine the international diffusion of new drugs under the post-TRIPS intellectual property rights regime. Even after controlling for drug characteristics and variation in national health expenditure, we find substantial differences across countries in the probability of a drug being commercially available, lowest in countries such as Brazil, Ch...
To what extent are firms kept out of a market by patents covering related technologies? Do patents held by potential entrants make it easier to enter markets? We estimate the empirical relationship between market entry and patents for 27 narrowly defined categories of software products during the period 1990-2004. Controlling for demand, market str...
Transaction costs and contracting problems associated with proliferation of patents may have a negative impact on innovation. We present novel data on the frequency with which innovative German firms encounter problems with access to intellectual property (IP) for innovation. While only a small percentage of all firms report halting or not starting...
There has been tremendous progress over the last decade in the development of health products--drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics--for neglected diseases. There are now dozens of candidate products in the pipeline.
Our purpose is to assess challenges that will arise in later-stage clinical development of these candidate health products and propose a...
We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 Internet-related firms that made an initial public offering on the NASDAQ at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, almost 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the exchange. Changes in the legal environment in the US in the 1990s made it much easier...
We examine the relationship between fragmented intellectual property (IP) rights and the innovative performance of firms, taking into consideration the role played by in-licensing of IP. We find that firms facing more fragmented IP landscapes have a higher probability of in-licensing. We observe a negative relationship between IP fragmentation and...
This paper considers the drivers of the structure and evolution of the life sciences innovation system, a remarkable success story for public support of science. The growth and performance of this system reflect the interaction between abundant scientific and technological opportunity, a reasonably effective and adaptive institutional and property...
We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single, large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns”. We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproport...
The pharmaceutical sector has unusual prominence in debates about IP policy, and has served as the front line for national and international controversies about the relationship between IPRs, R&D incentives, pricing and access to medicines. Notwithstanding the intensity of debate, on some crucial questions there is relatively little empirical evide...
We compute quality-adjusted price indexes for personal digital assistants (PDAs) for the period 1999 to 2004. Hedonic regressions indicate that prices are related to processor generation and clock speed, memory capacity, screen size and quality and the presence of a digital camera or wireless capability. A particularly salient feature of PDAs is po...
The impact of stronger intellectual property rights in the software industry is controversial. One means by which patents can affect technical change, industry dynamics, and ultimately welfare, is through their role in stimulating or stifling entry by new ventures. Patents can block entry, or raise entrants' costs in variety of ways, while at the s...
We thank Erik Garrison and Elissa Klinger for research assistance, and Ed Seguine and Rafael Campo of Fast-Track Inc. for access to their comparative clinical cost data. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the institutions with whom they are affiliated.
We begin by documenting trends in the changing geographical location of clinical trials for new medicines since 2002, away from Western Europe and Canada, and towards Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. We then develop a framework for modeling the factors affecting the globalization of clinical trials, particularly into emerging economies. Fact...
Background:
The apparent decrease in the rate of approval of new molecular entities has provoked extensive discussion and fears that the productivity of biopharmaceutical research and development has severely declined in recent years.
Objective:
To investigate the extent to which traditional measures of innovative output neglect important innova...
We examine the role of social relationships in facilitating knowledge flows by estimating the flow premium captured by a mobile
inventor's previous location. Once an inventor has moved, they are gone—but are they forgotten? We find that knowledge flows
to an inventor's prior location are approximately 50% greater than if they had never lived there,...
We examine the effects of software patents on entry and exit in 27 narrowly-defined classes of software products, using a dataset with comprehensive coverage of both mature public firms and small privately held firms between 1994 and 2004. Reflecting the complex economics underlying the relationship between patent protection, entry costs and indust...
To what extent are firms kept out of a market by patents covering related technologies? Do patents held by potential entrants make it easier to enter markets? We estimate the empirical relationship between market entry and patents for 27 narrowly defined categories of software products during the period 1990–2004. Controlling for demand, market str...
With spending on biologics rising and patent expiry approaching for several blockbuster biologics, Congress and the Food and Drug Administration are considering creating a clear pathway for so-called follow-on biologics. Differences between drugs and biologics will affect market outcomes in various ways. Conservative budget impacts are appropriate...
This paper examines the role of guanxi in the emergence of the Chinese institutional environment, institutional structure and business environment. In China, the institutional environment, institutional structure and resulting business environment are rapidly evolving and are not yet stable or predictable. Under these circumstances, guanxi is impor...
Do firms build new capabilities by hiring new people? We explore this question in the context of the pharmaceutical industry’s movement towards science-driven drug discovery. We focus particularly on the potential problem of endogeneity in interpreting correlation between hiring and changes in organizational outcomes as evidence of the impact of ne...
Research on factors that influence prescribing patterns and the extent of change produced by clinical trial findings is limited.
To examine the changes in prescribing of alpha-blockers for hypertension treatment before and after the April 2000 publication of the unfavorable Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial...
Rising research and development (R&D) expenditures by pharmaceutical companies are, in part, a consequence of changing industry structure, particularly the rise of the biotechnology sector. The creation of a market for biomedical science and increased vertical competition within the industry are likely to spur innovation and raise productivity, but...
It is well known that patent citations occur disproportionately between patents issued to inventors living in the same location, which has been taken as evidence of geographically localized knowledge spillovers. In this study, we find that patent citations also occur disproportionately often in locations where the cited inventor was living prior to...
Although pharmaceutical industry marketing and other factors may influence physician decisions regarding medication prescribing in the United States, little information is available about the composition of promotional efforts by promotional mode and medication class.
The aims of this study were to determine the magnitude of expenditures for common...
Research is limited on physicians' compliance with recent clinical guidelines for asthma treatment.
Our purpose was to investigate the relationships among clinical guidelines, asthma pharmacotherapy, and office-based visits through use of nationally representative data.
Nationally representative data on prescribing patterns by office-based US physi...
We examine the geographic co-location of university research and industrial R&D in three technology areas. While we find strong evidence of co-location of these vertically connected activities, regional economies appear to vary markedly in their ability to convert local academic research into local commercial innovation. We develop and test the hyp...
We conduct an empirical investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, on the role of patent
examiner characteristics in the allocation of intellectual property rights. In addition to
interviewing administrators and patent examiners at the USPTO, we analyze a novel dataset on
patent examiners and patent outcomes. Starting with the approximately...
We examine geographic concentration, agglomeration, and co-location of university research and industrial R&D in three technological areas: medical imaging, neural networks, and signal processing. Using data on scientific publications and patents as indicators of university research and industrial R&D, we find strong evidence of geographic concentr...
ABSTRACT Building on insights gained from interviewing administrators and patent examiners at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), we collect and analyze a novel dataset on patent examiners and patent outcomes. This dataset is based on 182 patents for which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled on validity betw...
In this book, the editors and a team of distinguished international contributors analyse the nature of organizational capabilities, studying how organizations do things, use their knowledge base, and diffuse that knowledge in competitive environment. Offering both theoretical analysis and detailed evidence from a variety of individual firms and sec...
Drug development performance is examined using data on clinical research projects of 10 pharmaceutical companies. In contrast to previous work on the discovery phase of pharmaceutical R&D we find a strong correlation between the diversity of firms' development efforts and the success probability of individual projects, but no effect of scale per se...
The protection of pharmaceutical innovations is being dramatically extended as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This change in intellectual property rights may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs. We use new survey data from India, the results of interviews, and measures...
Intellectual property is perhaps the most important — and often the only —significant asset of knowledge-based enterprises. The legal structure of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) defines not just ownership of these intangible assets, but also their value, and the nature of the markets in which they can be bought and sold. The statutory framewor...
This paper begins to reconcile competing perspectives on the origins of competitive advantage by examining the adoption of ‘science‐driven’ drug discovery, a performance‐enhancing organizational practice. Science‐driven drug discovery diffused slowly, allowing us to disentangle alternative theories of organizational heterogeneity. Adoption is drive...
What are the origins of competitive advantage? Although this question is fundamental to strategy
research, it is one to which we lack a clear answer. As strategy researchers we believe that some firms consistently outperform others, and we have some evidence consistent with this belief (Rumelt, 1991; McGahan and Porter, 1997). We also have a number...
Since the late 1980s the global intellectual property rights (IPR) system has been strengthening dramatically as much of the developing world introduces patent protection for new drug products. This may lead to more research on drugs to address developing country needs. As there are identifiable differences in the drug demands of these countries as...
U.S. taxpayers funded $14.8 billion of health related research last year, four times the amount that was spent in 1970 in real terms. In this paper we evaluate the impact of these huge expenditures on the technological performance of the pharmaceutical industry. While it is very difficult to be precise about the payoffs from publicly funded researc...
We examined the effects on work productivity of treatment with antihistamines in a retrospective study using linked health claims data and daily work output records for a sample of nearly 6000 claims processors at a large insurance company, between 1993 and 1995. We explained the variation in work output depending on the subjects' demographic chara...
Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting practice, the adoption of science driven drug discovery...
We examine the impact of publicly funded biomedical research on the in-house research of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry. Qualitative analysis of the history of the discovery and development of a sample of 21 significant drugs, and a program of interviews with senior managers and scientists reveals a complex and often bidirectional relations...
This study compared the drug-utilization costs and indicators of clinical outcomes associated with the use of risperidone and olanzapine in a hospital setting. We conducted a nonrandomized, retrospective chart review of consecutive patients identified as presenting with psychotic symptoms on inpatient wards at Riverview Hospital in British Columbia...
Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...
Recent research suggests that there is little difference in the rates of drug price inflation facing older and younger Americans, when age-related patterns of consumption are taken into account.
We examine the relationship between quality'' and market outcomes for a group of drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Though this is a widespread and debilitating disease with very substantial impacts on the health of patients and on the economy, currently available drugs have limited efficacy and serious side effects. Clinical research conduc...
Recently controversy has surrounded the issue of whether Social Security payments to the elderly should continue to be adjusted automatically according to changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). One issue in the public policy debate concerns whether price inflation is different for the elderly, particularly because the official Bureau of Labor S...
The authors examine the interface between for-profit and publicly funded pharmaceuticals. Firms access upstream basic research through investments in absorptive capacity in the form of in-house basic research and 'propublication' internal incentives. Some firms also maintain extensive connections to the wider scientific community, which they measur...
Count-data models are used to analyze the relationship between patents and research and development spending at the firm level, accounting for overdispersion using a finite mixed Poisson regression model with covariates in both Poisson rates and mixing probabilities. Maximum likelihood estimation using the EM and quasi-Newton algorithms is discusse...
We analyze cross-sectional patent data using a finite mixed Poisson regression model with covariates in Poisson rates and mixing probabilities. Maximum likelihood estimation based on the EM and quasi-Newton algorithms, a model selection procedure, residual analysis and goodness-of-fit tests are discussed. This model is applied to data on the relati...
We model demand for four cephalosporins and compute own- and cross-price elasticities between branded and generic versions of the four drugs. We model demand as a multistage budgeting problem, and we argue that such a model is appropriate to the multistage nature of the purchase of pharmaceutical products, in particular the prescribing and dispensi...
We empirically examine interaction between the public and private sectors in pharmaceutical research using qualitative data on the drug discovery process and quantitative data on the incidence of coauthorship between public and private institutions. We find evidence of significant reciprocal interaction, and reject a simple "linear" dichotomous mod...
This paper studies a class of Poisson mixture models that includes covariates in rates. This model contains Poisson regression and independent Poisson mixtures as special cases. Estimation methods based on the EM and quasi-Newton algorithms, properties of these estimates, a model selection procedure, residual analysis, and goodness-of-fit test are...
We examine the relationship between firm size and research productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. Using detailed internal firm data, we find that larger research efforts are more productive, not only because they enjoy economies of scale, but also because they realize economies of scope by sustaining diverse portfolios of research projects th...
We analyze the exploitation of an antibiotic in a market subject to open access on the part of antibiotic producers to the common pool of antibiotic efficacy. While the market equilibrium depends only on current levels of antibiotic efficacy and infection of the epidemiological system, the social optimum accounts for the dynamic externalities which...
Includes bibliographical references (p. 24-27).
We provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the lower the opportunity costs of individuals, the more likely they are to undertake entrepreneurial activity. This prediction emerged from earlier theoretical work in which we modeled the decision of individuals to develop new ventures on their own, seek the backing of a venture capitalist, or...
This paper contributes with empirical findings to European co-inventorship location and geographical coincidence of co-patenting networks. Based on EPO co-patenting information for the reference period 2000-2004, we analyze the spatial con figuration of 44 technology-specific co-inventorship networks. European co-inventorship (co-patenting) activit...
Recent advances in the theoretical literature have greatly expanded our understanding of the forces that shape the competitive dynamics of research and development, but a paucity of sufficiently detailed empirical data has left these insights relatively untested. We draw on unusually detailed qualitative and quantitative infernal data provided at t...
When the patent on a drug expires, there are substantial welfare gains to those consumers who, like the Food and Drug Administration, regard branded and generic versions as perfect substitutes. Standard price indexes fail to reflect this, since they treat generics as distinct new goods and 'link them in' with fixed weights. Alternative calculations...
This paper presents the results of a study of the determinants of research productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. Using disaggregated, internal firm data at the research program level from ten major pharmaceutical companies, we find no evidence of increasing returns to scale at either the firm or the research program level. However our result...
Includes bibliographical references (p. 25-27).
Includes bibliographical references (p. 13-14).
This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory....
This paper examines the stock market's valuation of a firm's innovative activity. We estimate the market's relative valuation of firms' tangible and intangible assets, focusing on knowledge capital in the form of accumulated "stocks" of R&D and patents. We tried to improve upon our estimates of the stock market's valuation of knowledge capital embo...
"Legal changes in the patentability of software since the mid 1990s have resulted in a substantial increase in the number of patents on software inventions. We focus here on the impact of transactions costs associated with patent "thickets" on new entrants' interactions with the capital markets. Using data on the financing of entrants into 27 narro...
Though the Federal government initiated significant commitments to both life sciences research and alternative energy research during the 1970s, there has been a sharp divergence in the growth and performance of these two innovation systems over the past three decades. This paper considers the drivers of the structure and evolution of the life scie...
This paper analyses whether lack of access to IPR stifles innovative activities of companies. Our analysis is based on survey evidence for German companies. Less than 4% of German companies could not start an innovation project or had to abandon it due to lack of access to IPR. In contrast, more than 11% of companies in the manufacturing sector had...