Exploring interactivity in biomedical innovation: a framework and case study analysis

The literature increasingly recognizes the interactive nature of innovation processes. Biomedical innovation, in particular, tends to be highly interactive. Given the ubiquitous nature of interactivity in biomedical innovation, we argue that the concept of innovation being interactive or distributed is not sufficiently differentiated to capture variation in the management and organization of innovation in the biomedical domain. In this paper, therefore we propose a framework that begins to unpack the interactive nature of innovation processes. This framework has two dimensions, organizational and knowledge integration, which represent, respectively, the mode of managing and organizing inter-firm relationships, and the level of inter-group knowledge combination required. The framework also recognizes the importance of the institutional context in shaping innovation processes. We test our framework with case data from an ongoing study of biomedical innovation in the UK and US.