What is 'Business Development'? The Case of Biotechnology

Abstract

"Business development" (BD) is an often used, but not well defined, term in the business world. Taking a strategy-as-practice perspective as a background, we explore the daily activities of BD in the German biotechnology industry. We show how BD tasks are defined and how they are fulfilled, what resources are used for this function and how it is organized. We compare our results with insights from the strategic management literature and show that business development is an example of what a modern type of planning might look like, but that it may be misleading to see the BD function in biotech firms in the same way as the dynamic capability the literature assumes. By doing this analysis, we contribute to an understanding of how entrepreneurial biotechnology ventures operate, and how they do their "strategizing" and "organizing" work.

Keywords: Business Development, Dynamic Capabilities, Planning Biotechnology, Strategy-as-Practice

JEL Classification: l22, L65, M10, M13