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Silico Research is a leader in the emerging field of the study of alliances, partnerships and intellectual property in intellectually-driven industries and economic sectors including the life sciences, technology and public sector research. What sets Silico Research apart is the evidence-based nature of our analysis and our deep databases spanning multiple sectors and regions. The following are the highlights of a few pieces of research that we have undertaken recently:
Meda buys Wyeth treatments
Swedish specialty pharmaceutical firm Meda AB has bought 10 marketed drugs for Skr525 million ($78 million) from Wyeth.
Pfizer invests in web-based software company
Why is Pfizer so heavily behind a struggling web-based software company operating in a crowded space?
Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals cuts staff by 25%
San Diego-based Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals Inc has announced that it will cut 25% of its staff.
Learning from game theory
Research by Silico Research and IBM has found that a respondent's assessment of the partner's openness to knowledge sharing and new ideas, and the cultural compatibility between the two partners showed a strong correlation with the success of the partnership as reported by the respondent. Why would the partner's openness to knowledge sharing and new ideas play a more important role in the respondent's assessment of the success of the alliance than, for example, the quality of the partner's staff or the partners's delivery on commitments?
The impact of conditional payment mechanisms on alliance outcomes
Conditional payments are commonly used in biopharmaceutical alliances. Recent research among senior executives in the biopharmaceutical industry by Silico Research and IBM showed that 81% of partnerships were using some form of conditional payment, such as options, milestone and license payments and royalties (n=130). Milestone payments were the most frequently used mechanism with 74% of surveyed partnerships using them. The research showed, however, that conditional payments do not improve the chances of a partnership succeeding.
The impact of alliances on share prices
It seems that alliances are good for companies, at least their share prices, whether or not the alliance achieves any positive outcomes. This raises two intruiging questions. First, why equity markets look upon alliances and partnerships so favourably in the first place. Second, does the equity market's view of alliances and the premium given to alliances fluctuate over time?
Reducing alliance risks
Consultants are in business to disagree with each other. Which makes it odd is that they all agree on at least one thing, somewhere around a half of all alliances 'fail'. But are they right? Research by Silico and IBM conducted among 148 senior executives in the biopharmaceutical industry indicates that far fewer of the partnerships which analysts reported as having failed can be regarded as true failures.
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