Öner Tulum is Executive Director of Research at the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a research affiliate of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute of Brown University. His current research on the pharmaceutical industry is being funded by grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2018-2019, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at SOAS University of London, funded by the Gatsby Foundation, studying the UK pharmaceutical industry.
In 2018, Tulum completed his PhD at the University of Ljubljana with funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme as part of the project, Innovation-fuelled Sustainable, Inclusive Growth (ISIGrowth) in Europe. His dissertation, “Innovation and Financialization in the U.S. Biopharmaceutical Industry,” examines the prevailing productivity crisis in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry and the impacts of financialization of the high-tech economy on the development and sustainability of organizational capabilities.
Tulum’s pioneering research examines company-level activities related to strategy, organization, and finance that determine whether a business enterprise creates value through the generation of higher-quality, lower-cost products or, alternatively, enters into a “value extraction” mode of resource allocation through “financialization”. His research on the tension between innovation and financialization draws upon, and has helped develop, “the theory of innovative enterprise.” The analysis of this unfolding tension, including the capability of some companies to resist financialization rather than succumb to it, requires in-depth analysis of the historical evolution of leading companies, in this case in the global pharmaceutical industry. Results of Tulum’s research have appeared in Competition and Change, Cambridge Elements in Reinventing Capitalism, The New York Times, the International Journal of Political Economy, Accounting Forum, and Research Policy.
Previously, Tulum was a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Center for Innovation and Structural Change (CISC) of the National University of Ireland Galway. Tulum and his colleagues at CISC studied the capabilities of technology-based Irish firms and their impact on Ireland’s global competitiveness, as part of the Project Lucerna, with funding from the Sixth European Union Research Framework program issued under the Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge program. Tulum holds an MBA degree from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth as well as a Masters’ degree in Regional Economic and Social Development from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
From Financialisation to Innovation in UK Big Pharma
AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline
by Öner Tulum, Antonio Andreoni and William Lazonick
Cambridge Elements in Reinventing Capitalism
Cambridge University Press, 2022
