Investigating the Technological Catch-up Efforts in Biopharmaceutical Firms of Iran

Technological catch-up is one of the key issues of technology development in developing countries and determining the appropriate catch-up process based on the environmental, institutional, and characteristics of different industries is a requirement of a successful catch-up. Review of the field of technology studies suggests that few empirical and theoretical studies have been conducted to determine the proper technological catch-up process for biopharmaceutical companies. Therefore, this paper try to investigate and explain appropriate process of technological catch-up of biopharmaceutical firms based on biopharmaceutical sector and country’s conditions. To this end, in this paper, through the case studies of successful companies in the field of biomedicine in Iran, the technology catch-up of these companies was analyzed. For this purpose, data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using theme analysis and coding, and the output of the analysis was presented in the form of a model. This paper shows that the studied companies first developed the capabilities of production (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), formulation, and obtaining health approvals) then entered the production process innovation. Finally, the studied companies have engaged in development of existing strains. This paper also shows that firms should obtain simpler capability (formulation) before obtaining more complex one (API production), is not seem to be followed by any of the studied companies. On contrary, obtaining the API production capability can be one of right approach in technological catching-up of biopharmaceutical firms.