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What is “Business Development”? — The Case of Biotechnology

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Abstract

“Business development” (BD) is an often used, but not well defined, term in the business world. Taking a strategy-as-practice perspective as a background, we explore the daily activities of BD in the German biotechnology industry. We show how BD tasks are defined and how they are fulfilled, what resources are used for this function and how it is organized. We compare our results with insights from the strategic management literature and show that business development is an example of what a modern type of planning might look like, but that it may be misleading to see the BD function in biotech firms in the same way as the dynamic capability the literature assumes. By doing this analysis, we contribute to an understanding of how entrepreneurial biotechnology ventures operate, and how they do their “strategizing” and “organizing” work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Socio-Economic Section, VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH, Steinplatz 1, 10623, Berlin, Germany

    Sonja Kind

  2. University of Bamberg, Feldkirchenstrasse 21, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Dodo zu Knyphausen-Aufseß (Chair of Human Resource Management and Organisation)

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  1. Sonja Kind
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  2. Dodo zu Knyphausen-Aufseß
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Correspondence to Sonja Kind.

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The alphabetical ordering of authorship reflects the fully collaborative nature of this work.

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Kind, S., zu Knyphausen-Aufseß, D. What is “Business Development”? — The Case of Biotechnology. Schmalenbach Bus Rev 59, 176–199 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03396747

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