Pharmaceutical managers have been encouraged to look to acquisitions and alliances for innovation. However, the literature warns that the capacity of a company to ‘absorb’ new knowledge is limited. Here, we introduce corporate divestitures as a tool for freeing up managerial attention. We build a sample of 349 companies, which announced 1784 divestitures and filed 63523 patents, over a 15-year period. We show that innovating companies that divest more produce more and improved patents, and those that divest to create corporate focus also produce more breakthroughs. In doing so, we introduce divestitures as an innovation tool, highlight the importance of the absorptive capacity of a company when discussing innovation, and add nuance to the discussion on external tools for innovation.

中文翻译：

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少做多做：利用资产剥离开启制药创新

制药公司管理者被鼓励通过收购和联盟来寻求创新。然而，文献警告说，公司“吸收”新知识的能力是有限的。在这里，我们介绍公司资产剥离作为释放管理层注意力的工具。我们构建了 349 家公司的样本，这些公司在 15 年期间宣布了 1784 项资产剥离并申请了 63523 项专利。我们表明，剥离更多的创新公司会产生更多和改进的专利，而那些剥离以创造企业焦点的创新公司也会产生更多的突破。在此过程中，我们将资产剥离作为一种创新工具，强调了公司在讨论创新时吸收能力的重要性，并为外部创新工具的讨论增添了细节。