Networks and Rapid Technological Change: Novel Evidence from the Canadian Biotech Industry

Former studies on inter‐organizational relationships have fallen short of properly identifying networks and elucidating factors that cause firms to entertain relationships in one type of network rather than another. This study adopts a methodology that is both empirical and comparative and thus constitutes a methodological departure from these previous studies. It also explicitly accounts for two structural characteristics of networks, namely, interactions and learning, to identify four types of networks, accumulative advantage networks, follow‐the‐trend networks, homophilies and multiconnectivity networks. It then investigates factors that cause firms to participate in any of these networks rather than another. Results show that even though networking is a common practice among biotech firms, most of them would rather keep this activity to a minimum. In addition, participation in these networks is found to vary according to the firm’s size, stage of development and its sector of activity.

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