invested $12 million in the alliance and obtained a US patent. The alliance also complemented Kirin’s patents covering transchromosome technology in Japan and the USA. According to Kazuma Tomizuka of Kirin, “Medarex’s patent application described the original concept of the human antibody from a mouse, but Kirin’s patent covered a mouse containing the whole immunoglobulin locus. Thus the two companies complemented each other in this field.”36 More broadly, the business benefits of the alliance were recognized by both partners. Donald Drakeman, the CEO and president of Medarex, stated, “We are very pleased to be forming a global alliance with a strong Asian partner like Kirin.” Another Medarex executive, Michael Appelbaum, announced, “This alliance gives Medarex a broad platform on which we can provide human antibodies to our partners.” Koichiro Aramaki, the president of Kirin’s pharmaceutical division, remarked, “We look forward to working with Medarex to bring the HuMAb and TC mice to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies around the world.” Drakeman summed up the benefits of the alliance in this way: “Kirin and Medarex together have the world’s most advanced genetically engineered tools for drug development. They [Kirin] have a mouse that has a human chromosome in it that allows those mice to make completely human antibodies, any kind of antibody you’d want to make. … We can help pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies around the world develop new drugs and really participate in the revolution in medicine that’s taking place right now.”
Kirin and Medarex combined their technologies to create a new crossbred mouse, the Kirin–Medarex Mouse (KM Mouse), which retained the capability to produce all human-antibody isotypes with a robust immune response previously unseen in any human-antibody-producing mouse system. This was the world’s most productive mouse in the creation of human antibodies. To support its antibody pharmaceutical operations, Kirin also committed itself to the full-scale production of proteins that are used for the target antibodies. By 2001, the KM Mouse had been supplied to 15 countries across the world to help develop novel therapeutic products for the treatment of cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases, autoimmune disease, and other serious conditions.
entrepreneurship. For example, Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995, pp. 135–140) mention it only briefly in their discussion of “bottom-up” management in a large firm.
This omission may be due to the difficulty of locating the entrepreneur in the labyrinth of the large, diversified firm. When Schumpeter (1934) published his early treatise on economic development, there were many solo entrepreneurs (as there still are today), but where is the entrepreneur in the large company? Some suggest that the locus of entrepreneurship resides in the marketing department because of its focus on new products and their market potential (e.g. Murray 1981). Although this proposition appears reasonable, because marketing clearly necessitates the creation of “new combinations,” can one not say the same of R&D, for example? It may be misleading, then, to state categorically that entrepreneurship resides in just one function. In principle, Kirznerian entrepreneurial alertness could emerge from a variety of functions and levels in a firm.
A more robust, if subtle, response is provided by the notion of “diffused entrepreneurship,” which was coined by the business historian B. W. E. Alford and subsequently developed by others (see Cole 1959; Alford 1976; Minkes and Foxall 1980; Minkes 1987). This posits that although a firm may be led by one (or several) dominant individual(s) – some of whom may exhibit entrepreneurial alertness, too – entrepreneurship is commonly dispersed throughout a modern business, and may be found in all major functional areas. Indeed, there is no unequivocal evidence to suggest that the marketing department is the sole location of such activity (Foxall and Minkes 1996). Clearly, this was the case in Kirin, where entrepreneurship – characterized by “new combinations,” or innovation – was evident in the licensing department, in manufacturing, and in a research laboratory.
Kirin’s diversification into biopharmaceuticals in the early 1980s was a consequence of opportunity recognition by a senior executive, at a time when many of the established pharmaceutical companies in Japan had yet to adopt the techniques of new biotechnology. It was acted upon by Kirin’s board of directors, in whom one might expect the entrepreneurial function to reside. However, Kirin’s subsequent development of competences relied to some extent on serendipity and instances of entrepreneurship throughout the firm. This was exemplified by the chance relaying of apparently inconsequential information by a Kirin employee and the realization of its significance by a licensing manager, Akihiro Shimosaka.
The entrepreneurial alertness and persistence of Shimosaka ensured appropriate recognition of a scientific advance by Amgen and the opportunity that an alliance with the US firm would afford. Similarly, in manufacturing, several engineers recognized an opportunity to improve production of EPO by a roller-bottle process, which benefited the Kirin–Amgen joint venture. Finally, the entrepreneurial alertness of a scientific gatekeeper, Isao Ishida, to external developments in transgenic technology prompted his research – stemming from his postdoctoral work in the USA – and led him to chance upon a scientific breakthrough in antibodies.
In conclusion, the specific case of Kirin’s biopharmaceutical history has some general implications. In his early work, Schumpeter (1934) categorically –
contradicting the view of Marshall (1930) – distinguished between the notion of the “entrepreneur” and the “manager.” Certainly, it is possible to do this at the conceptual level: management, conceived of as an efficient administration in the sense of Weberian bureaucracy, is distinguishable from the idea of entrepreneurial alertness to opportunities as yet unforeseen by others.37 However, perhaps this conceptual distinction misses an important point, especially for large, innovative companies. The solution is to combine the two, so that entrepreneurial attitude is seen as suffused throughout the entire organization of the firm. If this is the case, then one should perhaps reconsider the early Schumpeterian distinction between the entrepreneur and the manager – and indeed his later exclusion of the entrepreneur in large firms – and see them as coalescing in the figure of the
“entrepreneurial manager” (Minkes 1987). The existence of diffused entre- preneurship and the presence of the entrepreneurial manager in various functions – for example, the “entrepreneurial scientist” in R&D or the “entrepreneurial engineer” in production – are likely to ensure that emerging opportunities are recognized and acted upon. In addition, the case illustrates that serendipity often plays a crucial role in innovation.38
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David B. Audretsch1, T. Taylor Aldridge1, and Marcus Perry2
1Max Planck Institute of Economics, Kahlaische Str. 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
2School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, IL, USA
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