Organisations active in the life sciences make use of developments in modern biotechnology. Modern biotechnology constitutes a broad field of enabling technologies impacting different industrial sectors. Due to the potentially pervasive character of this set of enabling technologies, their development is considered important in stimulating sustainable economic development. However, this field is still in a nascent stage of development: new technological developments succeed one another rapidly, generating uncertainty about which technological opportunities to seize, and lead to the distribution of knowledge and competences across firms. New firms founded on the basis of promising inventions within this emerging technological field need to cope with a lack of external legitimacy. Engaging in partnering can contribute to this improving this legitimacy. Both the characteristics of biotechnology as an emerging technological field, as well as the lack of external legitimacy of the firms operating in it, make organisations inclined to engage in partnering. However, these characteristics may also be conceived as reducing the likelihood of a firm to find other organisations interested in collaboration as they generate uncertainty with regard to the chances of the firm's survival. The aim of this thesis is therefore to address the factors that contribute to the ability of technology-based firms active in an emerging technological field to collaborate with other organisations. The empirical focus is on Dutch dedicated life sciences firms (DDLSFs). This thesis addressess technology dynamics, network dynamics, resource-based explanations for partnering and processes of partner search. Data on the same population of firms are used to address these different aspects of importance to interorganisational collaboration. With regard to technology dynamics, it was shown that from 2000 to 2004 on the level of the population of newly founded firms the technological diversity increased rather than decreased. It was also shown that ...