Luvison, Dave, Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship
Executive Summary
Alliances have long been an important strategy in the pharmaceutical industry even thoughmore than half fail. Eli Lilly set out to create a core competence in the area of strategic alliancemanagement that would not only improve its success rate, but also differentiate the firm fromits competitors in the industry. The manner in which Lilly approached that challenge providesan applied example of how theories of organizational values, the resource based view, the fiveforces and the extended value chain can promote sustainable advantage. More importantly,Lilly's experience provides numerous managerial lessons on the importance of topto-bottomorganizational commitment to collaboration, deployment of personnel and financial resourcesto operationalize that commitment, and the development of routines and procedures thatenable the organization to learn from prior failure.
Introduction
The uncertainty of the drug development process has long made the outsourcing of researchand development (R&D) programs an important part of pharmaceutical firms' strategies(Clarke, Cortada, & Fraser, 2004). Such initiatives have typically taken the form of strategicalliances: collaborative organizational agreements (Inkpen, 2001) enabling firms to achievecompetitive advantage by producing and marketing new products and services (Gulati, 1998;Teece, 1992) and sharing resources, knowledge and capabilities (Spekman, Forbes, Isabella, &MacAvoy, 1998). Unfortunately, more than half of the alliances in the pharmaceutical industryfail (Clarke, et al., 2004; Fraser & Henderson, 2007), making this approach a highly risky one.Nevertheless, in the late 1 990s Eli Lilly and Company decided to pursue an aggressive alliancestrategy to augment its internal drug development and commercialization capabilities. Inorder
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