KNOWLEDGE STRATEGIES THROUGH TIE-UPS- A LOOK AT INDIAN PHARMA COMPANIES Susobhan Goswami* *Professor, Management, Thiagarajar School of Management, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. E-mail: goswami@tsm.ac.in Abstract In the last decade or so, strategic alliances and partnerships among pharmaceutical and biotech companies have doubled to around 700 per year per sector, although most of this increase came in the early years. Even though all big pharma companies have a good selling and marketing capacity, many alliances are created to optimise the commercialisation of products, for example, through targeting forms of strategic partnerships such as collaborative research, contract research, co-production agreements, co-marketing arrangements, cross-distribution arrangements, and technology licensing are being utilised for capacity additions, brand acquisitions, marketing channel and Development alliances. Keywords: Alliances, Collaboration, Market access, Technology, Partnerships, Strategy In the last decade or so, strategic alliances and partnerships among pharmaceutical and biotech companies have doubled to about 700 per year per sector, although most of this increase came in the early years. Collaboration is a viable option, not only to enhance company’s product range, but also its geographic coverage. Why do managers retain interest in working with potential competitors? Knowledge is the key to competitiveness; however, given the global is unlikely that one enterprise can attain all of the resources needed to prosper without help from other organisations (Richter and Vettel, 1995). Meaningfully, knowledge assets drive the world economy as well as the balance of power in alliances (Windsperger, Kocsis, and Rosta, 2009). Alliances may be the effective means to disseminate “embedded” knowledge (information that managers cannot easily articulate) to outsiders. Alliances are strategic tools that to competitors (Kogut, 1988). Therefore, “cooperation becomes a low cost route for new competitors to gain technology and market access” (Hamel et al., 1989, p. 133). More importantly, alliance partners are inevitably seeking to improve “their ability to obtain some leverage over other organisations” (Pennings, 1981, p. 444). It follows that “…a laggard (slow learner)… fewer and fewer distinctive skills, it must reveal more and more of its internal operations...” (Hamel et al., 1989, p. 135). But integration of learning takes time (Crossan and Inkpen, 1995). Strategies for forming alliances are not simple. Strategists need to be aware of the pitfallsthat exist on what can be learned before deciding to enter an alliance (Richter and Vettel, 1995), and must show patience because there are lags between the inception of an alliance and the transfer of knowledge (Crossan and Inkpen, 1995). Strategists conceive of “…Marketing as a boundary-spanning organisational function… that develops certain unique (Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies Attainment of Market Knowledge, Page 4) competencies within the organisation” (Varadarajan, 1992, p. 339-340). Moreprecisely, “Marketing strategy’s difference isthat it customers, competitors, and other stakeholders” (Wind and Robertson, 1983, p. 12). Similarly, Day (1992) holds that Article can be accessed online at http://www.publishingindia.com