The contractual strategic alliance management and the performance of the alliance portfolio: a study in the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry

• Grant number: 11/23618-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2012
• End date: March 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Administration - Business Administration
• Principal Investigator: Walter Bataglia
• Grantee: Jessica Ribeiro Cordeiro
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Sociais e Aplicadas (CCSA). Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (UPM). Instituto Presbiteriano Mackenzie. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The contractual strategic alliance is an organizational form adopted in dynamic and complex environments, characterized by the spread of knowledge and resources among agents. Incentives for cooperative organizational forms are linked to the agents' perception that the competitive environment is unfavorable for clustering import resources and capabilities and the vertical integration would lead to less flexibility and irreversibility or weaken available advantages. The importance of alliance management is linked to the fact that though activities developed by partners are interdependent, partners are autonomous, owing to self-interests. The alliance management routines include the eligible-partner search; the integration, communication, and coordination of interdependent activities run by partners; and the search for synergy among the organization's partnerships. It is detached from the potential relationship between these activities and the alliance portfolio performance and the fact pointed out by the literature that about 50% of the alliances do not attend to the companies' expectations and that their results are much different for every company. This research project intends to collaborate with the understanding of this situation, establishing an objective to comprehend how it occurs the relationship between contractual strategic alliance management activities and the alliance portfolio performance. It was chosen to develop research in the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry, human health segment. The choice was directed by the segment's characteristics that have led companies to adopt this kind of organizational arrangement for different activities, like R&D, clinical tests, manufacturing, or distribution, in global or domestic scope. It is detached from the industry's importance, included in the PITCE - Industrial, Technological and Foreign Commercial Policy in 2004. It is expected that the results of this work can favor the improvement of alliance management organizational routines. The proposed research is qualitative and applies the multiple case study strategy, based on systematic interviews with Brazilian pharmaceutical companies' managers. The list of pharmaceutical laboratories is going to be taken from the Medicine Electronic Instructions for Patients of ANVISA - National Agency for Sanitary Surveillance, which presents registered and notified medicines, commercialized in Brazil, and the companies detaining their registers and manufacturing them. Companies are going to be contacted by phone and invited to participate by an electronic mailing. The criterion for the choice of companies will be that they will have developed contractual strategic alliances in the last three years. The number of cases will be determined by the information saturation logic, in which new cases will be developed while new subjects will not be extinguished. It is estimated that at least 6 contractual strategic alliance cases will be studied. Interviews will be semi-structured, guided by predefined questions. Cases will be analyzed individually and latterly as a whole. Collected data will be submitted to categorical thematic analysis with categories defined a priori. The "explanation building" tactic will be applied in the crossing analysis of categories in each case individually. That is, it will be inducted explanation propositions, not definitive, about alliance management routines and their relationship to the alliance portfolio performance in every case. Final explanation propositions will be generated based on classifications and comparisons between cases, identifying similarity and divergence factors. Propositions generated by the inductive process will be improved by specific literature.(AU)