Over the course of the 1980s, companies attempted to develop new organisational strategies to balance competition with collaboration. Although a variety of theoretical frameworks acknowledged this development there have been very few empirical studies in which the nature and extent of this collaborative integration and the implications for industries in the 1990s have been examined. In this paper, the Canadian pharmaceutical industry is used as the empirical context for an examination of collaboration. The author focuses on the relationship between small and large firms, biotechnology-based companies, and university research and argues that these collaborative linkages need to be more firmly developed in our theoretical discussions if we are to make sense of the corporate world in the 1990s.
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