An exploratory perspective on reciprocal pharmaceutical export operations and their underlying dynamic capabilities

To gain a sustainable competitive advantage, it is vital for firms to nurture capabilities that are hard for others to imitate, specifically in rapidly changing business environments. Based on the dynamic capability framework, we designed this study: 1) to explore major export operations in pharmaceutical firms; 2) to investigate their underlying dynamic capabilities; 3) to establish associations between them. We conducted in-depth interviews with 11 pharmaceutical export firms and analysed data using a grounded inductive approach. The study yielded an integrative process model that explains how pharmaceutical export firms manage their dynamic capabilities by establishing associations between export operations and their underlying dynamic capabilities. The interviews highlighted leadership as an agent for developing dynamic capabilities, although the literature has no satisfactory explanations for its cognitive mechanisms. We see this gap as a starting point for developing a new concept - export leadership.