Pharmaceutical Technology Licensing: An Analysis in the Field of Cardiovascular Disease

The technological flows and licensing across institutions plays an essential role in the process of pharmaceutical innovation by integrating the competing resources of different institutions and sharing the costs and risks, especially in the current era of open innovation. This article aims to generally describe technology licensing activities on cardiovascular drugs and, based on visualizing technology flows at different stages, to further investigate the multistage leading performers and their licensing strategies. From the IMS R&D Focus, a world-leading database in the healthcare industry, the research sample comprises 632 licensing inventions for cardiovascular drugs from 1980 to 2014. Furthermore, a network-based approach is employed to visualize the technology flows by setting nodes to represent licensing institutions and edges for licensing behavior, and further to analyze institution leaders and licensing strategies through various indicators, e.g., out-degree, in-degree, and betweenness centrality. The results show that technology licensing networks gradually transformed from sparse to dense from the preclinical to marketed stages. There is obvious synergy and complementation among universities, multinational enterprises, and mid- and small-sized enterprises. R&D organizations represented by universities denote themselves as upstream in the pharmaceutical R&D chain. As a hub, multinational enterprises play an important role as technology integrators and show the most frequent technology licensing, both in technology inflows and outflows, whereas various small firms are viewed as satellite partners around multinational enterprises. This work provides valuable insights for pharmaceutical researchers, investors, policymakers, and technology brokers not only in the field of the discovery of cardiovascular drugs but also of other therapeutic drugs.