Tracking the frontier of innovation: The contrasting roles of strategic alliances and individual scientific collaborations

How can firms in science and technology driven industries, like biotechnology, keep abreast of continuously evolving and dispersed knowledge? Perhaps more importantly, how can these firms, when necessary, adjust their innovative trajectories and capabilities to align closely to the cutting edge of innovation? This challenge is significant given the path dependent nature of technology development. Supporting our predictions derived from evolutionary economics and behavioral theories, we find that biotechnology firms with greater numbers of external individual collaborations are likely to grow increasingly aligned to the frontier of emerging innovation. Firms with greater numbers of strategic alliances and internal individual collaborations are likely to grow more distant from the innovation frontier. We also find that technological specialization decreases the alignment of firms to the innovative frontier.