Öner Tulum is the co-founder and Executive Director of Research at the Academic-Industry Research Network (www.theAIRnet.org), a private, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also collaborating with a Cambridge-based biotechnology company to develop a sustainable biopharma business model aimed at maximizing patient value by improving health outcomes and enhancing the accessibility and affordability of innovative medicines. Tulum’s pioneering research, conducted under the mentorship of William Lazonick, examines the tension between innovation and financialization within the biopharmaceutical industry. This work draws upon and helps to develop the “theory of innovative enterprise,” analyzing how business enterprises can create value through the development of higher-quality, lower-cost products or, alternatively, shift into a “value extraction” mode. His analysis of this unfolding tension, including the capacity of some companies to resist financialization, has been funded by grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Tulum completed his Ph.D. 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 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. His work has been published in journals such as Healthcare Management Forum, Competition and Change, the International Journal of Political Economy, Accounting Forum, and Research Policy, and he has been featured in The New York Times. He is the author of two ebooks with Cambridge University Press: From Financialisation to Innovation in UK Big Pharma (2022) in the Elements in Reinventing Capitalism series, and Innovation versus Financialization in the US Pharmaceutical Industry (forthcoming) in the Elements in Corporate Governance series.
Tulum holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana, an MBA, and a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. Previously, he was a research affiliate of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute of Brown University, a post-doctoral research fellow at SOAS University of London, funded by the Gatsby Foundation, studying the UK pharmaceutical industry, a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland Galway, where he was part of Project Lucerna. This project, funded by the European Union Sixth Research Framework, involved studying the capabilities of technology-based Irish firms and their impact on Ireland’s global competitiveness.
