Critical Success Factors in Medium-sized Pharmaceutical Enterprises

Abstract: The definition of innovation strategies has been widely discussed in literature. Several authors refer to the systematic exploration of critical success factors (e.g. quality, innovation ability and scale effects) as being a useful instrument for strategy development. Previous research has focused predominantly on qualitative descriptions and on setting up a general framework for critical success factors, but not on the correlations between critical success factors and a company’s success. Based upon a study in the pharmaceutical branch, our paper confirms that there are quantitative correlations between corporate-type-specific success factors and the success of a company. Our paper supports the theory that companies that focus on less critical success factors are more successful. Furthermore, the concept of critical success factors has so far been a theoretical approach, but has lacked a practical implementation. By using the methodology used in this study the concept of critical success factors can be adopted by all types of companies.