THE STRUCTURAL EVOLUTION OF MULTIPLEX ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS: RESEARCH AND COMMERCE IN BIOTECHNOLOGY

Inter-organizational alliances and the networks they generate have been a central topic in organization theory over the last decade. However, network analyses per se have been static. Even when information over tune has been available, the temporal component has been set aside or aggregated to the end point of the study. Substantially more research has been conducted on organizations initiating inter-organizational relationships. The organization-level research has been decidedly dynamic in nature. However, organization-level research has largely examined the structural characteristics of the networks generated by organizational actions. Work combining network-level and organization-level phenomena has been rare and, to our knowledge, no research including the effects of organization-level actions on the evolution of network-level phenomena has occurred. In this chapter we use more than 6000 R&D alliances and more than 6500 M&D alliances initiated by more than 1000 biotech firms in the U.S.