Building the “World's Pharmacy”: The Rise of the German Pharmaceutical Industry, 1871–1914

Abstract

The German pharmaceutical industry dominated global drug creation from the late nineteenth century to World War I. Most of the industry's products were based on extensive scientific research. However, the research intensity of products varied across companies and intensified over time. A main contribution of this article is thus to identify different groups of firms within the industry and provide an analysis of their product portfolios before 1914. This essay embeds scientific developments in a coevolutionary framework of science, firms, and institutions and shows that the industry's research capabilities were complemented by other important factors for corporate success.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.