Beyond the transnational: exploring organisational complexity and innovation in biopharmaceutical firms

This thesis deals with the complexity of organisations within multinational enterprises (MNEs) of the biopharmaceutical industry. The transnational organisation is the driver for worldwide innovation and with the challenges of drug development offers a research agenda. The thesis explores the complexity of science, a firm's ability to innovate and the financial challenges as constructs for understanding the complexity of the organisation. The transformation of transnational organisations is based on the evolutionary changes in MNEs and the adaptation to environmental changes.

This phenomenon of interest is investigated with a qualitative study based on company cases studies combined with interviews with senior directors in biopharmaceutical MNEs. A subsequent configurational analysis using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) reveals a joint set relationship of the constructs of the complexity of science, a firm's ability to innovate and the financial constraints influences the complexity of the organisation. The main finding of this study is the enhancement of the understanding of organisational complexity via reconfiguring the theory presented by Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) to consider the ability to innovate, the complexity of science, and financial challenges. The crucial contribution of this thesis is the emergence of the neomultidomestic transnational, neo-international transnational, in addition to validating the presence of the neo-global transnational archetype (Mees-Buss et al., 2019). Enhancing and updating the area of research concerning MNE archetypes to reflect current form is important because existing research significantly traces back decades to the work of Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989). Consequently, this study provides a pivotal contribution to research into MNEs because it demonstrates that the firms' have gone beyond the transnational.