Transforming Academic Knowledge for Drug Innovation: A Practice-Based View of Objects, Entrepreneurs, and Institutions By

Academic-industry partnerships in biopharmaceuticals have been commonly arranged through firms licensing academic patents and universities receiving research grants and royalties. However, this arrangement does not accommodate the complexity in science. The research question of this dissertation is what kinds of social arrangements transform academic knowledge for complex innovation. I conducted interviews and field observations with scientists involved in drug discovery research. I developed a grounded theory on three dimensions of knowledge that characterize the boundaries for science-based complex innovation. One dimension is the materiality of complex knowledge, which emphasizes on the situated and contextualized learning about how drugs work in the realities of human biology. Another is the epistemic dimension, which highlights the ever-emergent nature of knowledge that motivates scientists to keep asking questions and drawing on rich scientific theories. The third is the activity dimension that directs a purpose of multidisciplinary collaboration among scientists. These dimensions reveal how scientists in the basic and clinical research communities go about creating and commercializin