Business Networks in the Colombian Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

Strategic alliances are one of a company's main competitive tools. In some contexts, however, it is difficult to know the value of such alliances because there are no databases that track this information. in this paper, using data mining techniques, we build a database of the Colombian pharmaceutical industry. With Social Network Analysis (SNA) and bibliometric tools, we identify the shape of this ecosystem. We discover two main sub-communities: one international and one national. Finally, we show that, for the most part, players with the largest revenues play the most significant role in the network, while some organizations play a very important role that can only be discovered through SNA.