Speeding up Capacity Building under Time Pressure to Produce COVID-19 Vaccines

Swiftly reacting to unforeseeable events is of utmost importance for firms. The COVID-19 outbreak has not only severely impacted individual and collective health worldwide but also hindered the global economy. The COVID-19 vaccine was considered by many specialists the best strategy to face this pandemic. Developing a vaccine in a timely manner was as daunting a task as scaling-up manufacturing to produce billions of doses. To swiftly increase the production capability, pharmaceutical companies needed to rely on technology transfer to build organizational capability and ramp-up production. There was a clear paradigm shift as speeding up of capacity building and technology transfer was driven by volume maximization, as opposed to profit, and characterized by cooperation as opposed to being a reaction to competitive pressure. We consider the question of how to speed up capacity building under time pressure. We thoroughly explored the empirical setting with multiple case studies across the pharmaceutical industry and supplemented our findings through an in-depth case study with a vaccine manufacture firm. Our findings suggest that celerity in producing vaccines was achieved by managing the interdependency across key enables with regards to production setup, relationships across the supply chain, and knowledge novelty.