Öner Tulum

Postdoctoral Research Associate at SOAS University of London
Senior Researcher at the Academic-Industry Research Network (theAIRnet)

Öner Tulum is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at SOAS University of London and Senior Researcher at the Academic-Industry Research Network (theAIRnet).  He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Ljubljana 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 prevailing 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. Tulum’s pioneering research examines company-level activities related to strategy, organization, and finance that determine whether a business enterprise creates value through the generation of higher-quality, lower-cost products or, alternatively, enters into a “value extraction” mode of resource allocation through “financialization”. Tulum’s research on the tension between innovation and financialization draws upon, and has helped develop, “the theory of innovative enterprise”. The analysis of this unfolding tension, including the capability of some companies to resist financialization rather than succumb to it, requires in-depth analysis of the historical evolution of leading companies, in this case in the global pharmaceutical industry. Results of his PhD research have appeared in the New York Times: “How High Drug Prices Inflate C.E.O.s’ Pay,” (Feb. 26, 2019) and, in the International Journal of Political Economy: “Financialized Corporations in a National Innovation System: The US Pharmaceutical Industry” (2018), both co-authored with William Lazonick. Tulum is currently continuing his research on the global pharmaceutical industry through a one-year post-doctoral fellowship, at SOAS University of London, with funding from the UK-based Gatsby Foundation. Previously, Tulum was a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Marie Curie Research Fellow in National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), studying the capabilities of technology-based firms and their impact on Ireland’s global competitiveness. The LUCERNA project was funded through the European Union Sixth Framework Programme under the Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge program hosted by the Center for Innovation and Structural Change at NUIG. Tulum holds an MBA degree from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a Masters’ degree in Regional Economic and Social Development from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.