Pathways to a drug: A mixed methods analysis of emergence

Despite the calls for a broader methodological base, the technology management and the forecasting literature remain short of studies synthesising quantitative and qualitative methods. This paper addresses this gap by employing a mixed method approach to study the case of Taxol, a revolutionary drug developed to fight ovarian and breast cancer. The paper shows in detail how a data mining-based network model can be synthesised with qualitatively created event narrative to understand the development of a technology and its ecosystem. As a result, the paper shows an npartite network of Taxol drug ecosystem containing over 4,000 nodes and 11,000 edges. The network enables decision makers to understand the process, interaction of actors and lock-in mechanism in the process of technological development.