Building a conducive environment for life science-based entrepreneurship and industry clusters

Abstract

The global biopharmaceutical industry, with over $70bn in revenues and 700 publicly listed firms posting double-digit growth in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific in 2006, represents an attractive and promising high-growth industry of the future. Broad scientific advances and commercial successes have captured the attention and aspirations of policy makers, business people, and investors alike in spurring sector growth. An understanding of the fundamental forces that shape the industry, including the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, as well as many promising industry trends, offer several implications for investors and policy makers. This study explores industry dynamics affecting growth patterns, biotech industry cluster evolution in an era of increasing globalisation, and enabling factors which support entrepreneurship activity, productivity, and sustainability. Governments and investors seeking to create and enhance biotech entrepreneurship face several enabling trends including increasing numbers of science graduates worldwide, accelerating pace of scientific advancement, dominating role of globalisation enabling greater collaboration, democratising forces of the internet, and the relentless competitive pressure to innovate. As such, policy agendas should focus on increasing factor conditions to enhance start-up formation, alliances, and skilled employment, rather than attempt to select specific winners and losers among specific sub-sectors or individual firms.

The Effectiveness of Risk Management: An Analysis of Project Risk Planning Across Industries and Countries

“…( 59 ) Consider, for example, the biotechnology industry, which is perceived to possess high levels of product and regulatory risk. ( 60 ) Another explanation may lie with the fact that perceived levels of risk are associated with the experience and maturity of the project manager, organization, and industry. Maturity models, which evaluate the overall effectiveness of organizational processes, ( 57 ) have found that construction and engineering organizations have the highest levels of maturity.…”

Firms' use of organizational, personal, and intermediary networks to gain access to resources for internationalization

“…Resources can be classified in different ways (Chetty & Wilson, ; Gassel & Pascha, ; Tolstoy & Agndal, ; Wei & Clegg, ), this study employs the same classification Tolstoy and Agndal () developed: market, human, reputational, financial, physical, and technical resources. Their classifications were derived from other studies in the biotech industry (e.g., Ahn & Meeks, ; Gassel & Pascha, ; Powell, Koput, & Smith‐Doerr, ). As this study focuses on firms from the health‐technology sector, it is reasonable to argue that the same classification is meaningful also in this study.…”

Enhancing Corporate Governance in High-Growth Entrepreneurial Firms

“…Within the context of the economic mega-forces of information technology, biotechnology, and global capital markets, as well as a heavy reliance on primary industries and associated commodity pricing risk [Ahn and Meeks (2007); McKinsey (2004); NZVCA (2007)], there is a general consensus that New Zealand needs to evolve toward a higher value-added economy to experience sustainable economic growth and enhance standards of living [Clark (2002); FRST (2007); MoRST (2007,2008)]. High growth¯rms, such as the elite group of Deloitte/Unlimited Fast 50 representing the fastest growing set of¯rms in New Zealand, embody this hoped-for evolution [Unlimited (2008)].…”