ABSTRACT
Innovation is the ultimate source of economic progress. For innovation to occur there has to be an awareness and understanding of changes that take place in consumer demand, technological capabilities and the wider business and economic environments. This understanding depends on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs have played a fundamental role in the industrial and information eras by recognizing and responding to opportunities. How they seize and adapt them to their own environment is crucial for success. This chapter is concerned with the way entrepreneurs interplay with their institutional environment over time. By examining two intense periods of the history of the pharmaceutical industry-the antibiotics and the global eras-through six leading Spanish laboratories, the chapter seeks to understand how fi rms embedded in late industrializing countries and operating in technologically complex industries respond to major opportunities and try to catch up with the most advanced fi rms in the world.
