The Role of Private Equity in Life Sciences

In a roundtable published in this journal a year ago, there was a clear consensus that the R&D function in big pharma was inefficient and in need of major restructuring, possibly through increased investments by venture capital and private equity firms. In this discussion, an accomplished group of industry practitioners begins by looking at the prospects for both venture capital and private equity to play meaningful roles in financing early- and mid-stage drug development. In so doing, they explore questions like the following:

• • Are there ways for big pharma and biotech to reduce “science risk” and make R&D funding more profitable and attractive to venture capital and private equity—and perhaps even hedge funds?
• • What roles do you see for specialty PE firms like Symphony Capital and Paul Capital, which are now bundling mid-stage development assets and securitizing royalties?

Then the panelists turn to the broader life sciences industry and consider the outlook for leveraged private equity transactions involving marketed products, late-stage development, and services. Here they consider issues like the following:

• • Will PE be attracted to less-R&D-intensive activities like medtech and generics?
• • Have the recent consolidation through mergers and reorganization of big pharma into decentralized business units created opportunities for carve-outs of certain businesses?

For big pharma and life sciences companies in general, the answers to such questions point to greater specialization and focus achieved partly through strategic alliances with venture capital, private equity, and even hedge funds, and involving marketed products and services as well as early-stage drug development.     

Market versus Corporate Structure in Plant-Level Innovation Performance

This paper examines the effect which market and corporate structure have on the extent of innovation for a sample of circa 300 manufacturing plants located in Scotland. Innovation is defined as the introduction of a commercially significant new product at the establishment level. The theoretical model of Geroski (1990) is extended to incorporate plant- level variables such as size, multiplant operation, the presence of R&D facilities and external/indigenous ownership. A distinction is made between the direct and indirect effects of these variables. Negative binomial estimations indicate that corporate structure influences are more important in determining the number of innovations than market structure and barrier to entry variables. Plant size, foreign ownership and the presence of R&D are all positively associated with innovation. Direct effects greatly outweigh indirect effects. Tobit estimations on the number of innovations per employee support the findings of Acs and Audretsch (1988) that smaller enterprises are more innovation intensive than larger enterprises, at least up to a limit of around 1200 employees. The positive effect of R&D arises principally from increasing the probability of a plant becoming an innovator, rather than from making a plant more innovation intensive. By contrast, the importance of size lies principally in encouraging further innovations among plants which are already innovators, but less than proportionately with the increase in employment size.     

The development of business–government strategies by diversified firms

This paper uses grounded theory to explore internal (intrafirm) conflicts in the formulation of business–government strategies by corporations with diversified business units. We find that three types of conflict exist within firms: conflict over proactive policy positions advocated by the firm (prepolicy issues), conflict over reactive internal distribution of compliance costs/benefits (postpolicy issues), and representational conflict (e.g., individual business units vs. corporate representation in the external public policy arena). We also develop a grounded framework for organizational structures for conflict resolution in the strategic management of government relations, based upon our case studies, and find a relationship between particular structures and the degree of diversification. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Frame of reference rater training issues: recall,time and behavior observation training

This study investigated three controversial issues regarding frame of reference training (FOR), a type of rater training: (1) Does it improve behavioral recall, (2) Can it be improved by incorporating behavior observation training (BOT), and (3) Can its effects persist over time? Results suggested that even though FOR training increases the number of behaviors recalled, it does not necessarily improve the quality of the recalled behaviors, but a combined FOR + BOT program does improve recall quality. Lastly, results suggested that FOR training can improve rating accuracy, even after a two‐week delay between rater training and the rating task.     

The Impact of Ethics Education on Reporting Behavior

We examine the impact of an ethics education program on reporting behavior using two groups of students: fourth year Masters of Accounting students who just completed a newly instituted ethics education program, and fifth year students in the same program who did not receive the ethics program. In an experiment providing both the opportunity and motivation to misreport for more money, we design two social condition treatments – anonymity and public disclosure – to examine whether or to what extent ethical values are internalized by students. We find that when participants are anonymous, misreporting rates are nearly the same regardless of ethics program participation. However, when their reporting behavior is made public to the cohort, participants who completed the ethics program misreported at significantly lower rates than those who did not receive the ethics program. The results suggest that ethics education does not necessarily result in internalized ethical values, but it can impact ethical behavior.     

Waterfall attractions in coastal tourist areas: the Yorkshire coast and Queensland's Gold Coast compared

A comparative study of tourism development on the Yorkshire coast and Queensland's Gold Coast illustrates the importance of waterfalls as attractions, even in beach orientated tourist areas catering mainly for seaside holidaymakers. A relative decline in the importance of the Yorkshire coast waterfall attractions whereas those of the Gold Coast hinterland continue to play a major role is attributed to differences in quantity and quality of these scenic resources, problems of access and the availability of other, and, for many, superior, waterfall attractions within easy reach. Appropriate levels of development at and access to waterfall sites are discussed. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley &Sons, Ltd.     

The global dissemination of scholarly tourism outputs from 1976 to 2016: evidence from Australia

This paper explores the growing breadth and depth of networks and collaborations in the expansion of tourism scholarship. By using bibliometric techniques and mining data from 25 top tourism (and hospitality) journals, the authors provide a visualization of how the field has developed. Focusing on the example of Australia, it shows a process of intensifying internationalization with leading institutions in the UK and Hong Kong, though with minimal representation from institutions in less developed countries. The paper confirms previous findings about the growth of multi-authorships and an increasing propensity for tourism scholars to collaborate with counterparts at other institutions.