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Convergence processes are based on the activity of distinct industry sectors showing cross-industry collaborations. The aim of this paper is to analyze cross-industry collaborations between the food and pharmaceutical sectors in the convergence area of functional foods. Selected companies from food (Nestlé/Danone) and pharmaceutical (Martek/Bayer HealthCare) sectors are analyzed using the determinants of motivation and industrial scope. The analysis shows that food companies are more active in cross-industry collaborations than pharmaceutical companies. The latter are more active at the front-end of the value chain focusing on research and development, and delivering their ingredients to food companies that due to their higher expertise in consumer marketing launch the products. While the first cross-industry collaborations were based on an exploration motivation, those that follow focus on exploitation. Acquisitions and licensing agreements are dominant in inside-out and outside-in processes, whereas strategic alliances and joint ventures are based on a coupled process between the food and pharmaceutical sectors.
The aim of this paper is to advance the research on innovation at the pharma-nutrition interface by analysing the three steps of science, technology and market convergence in the area of probiotics using a life cycle perspective. Results from a bibliometric analysis drawing upon 8245 scientific publications, 2082 patents and 1357 news reports focussing on product launch announcements from 1990 up to 2009 indicate that the proposed curve shapes of the life cycles in the theory based framework can be transferred to the case of probiotics. There is a time shift considering the life cycles showing the same activities of the industrial sectors at different moments of time. The food sector dominates the field of probiotics by driving science, technology and market convergence showing earlier activities in scientific publications, patents as well as product launches, while presenting a higher clockspeed between the different life cycle phases. While the food sector dominates product launches for food products containing probiotics, the pharmaceutical sector dominates the product launches of the supplement market. In addition, a clear trend towards industry convergence can be identified by the growing number of cross-industry activities.
Functional foods are still of increasing interest among the scientific community. Based on the extensive literature about functional foods, four main research areas can be identified: functional food innovation (1); the scientific background of the health benefits of functional foods (2); the regulation of functional foods (3); and consumer acceptance of functional foods (4). These research areas are not detached from each other, and each presents a consumer perspective. Although multifaceted studies focus on consumer acceptance of functional foods, literature regarding a structured framework of the determinants of functional food acceptance is limited. The aim of this review is to provide the reader with an overview of the recent literature on consumer attitudes towards functional foods and with an extensive structured framework of the determinants of functional food acceptance and their intertwined relationships. The scientific literature discusses a plethora of determinants of consumer acceptance of functional foods. These determinants can be categorized into consumer and market attributes, which show interwoven relationships with each other. On the one hand, consumer attributes are widely discussed in the literature, while on the other hand structured analyses of the market perspective are inadequately represented. Additionally, the ongoing development of new scientific findings regarding health benefits of different functional ingredients leads to a large amount of new functional food products in the market. Consequently, the research area of functional foods and in particular consumer acceptance of functional food innovation will remain an important research field in the coming years.