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This groundbreaking book is the first comparative analysis of the relative strengths of global bioregions. Growth Cultures investigates the rapidly growing phenomena of biotechnology and sets this study within a knowledge economy context. Philip Cooke proposes a new knowledge-focused theoretical framework, ‘the New Global Bioeconomy’, against which to test empirical characteristics of biotechnology.In this timely volume, Cooke unifies concepts from the sociology of science, economic sociology and evolutionary economic geography to focus on the problems and prospects for policy agencies worldwide trying to build ‘biotechnology clusters’. He develops a superior policy approach of thinking in terms of platforms that integrate proximities and pipelines, which will be of significant interest for the scientific and technological communities as well as economic development policy communities.Growth Cultures will make fascinating reading for students, policy makers and researchers across management and business studies, innovation and knowledge studies, sociology, science and technology policy, applied economics, development studies and regional science.

This paper examines the model of China's biotechnology innovation. We apply the typology of entrepreneurial, partnership, and developmental state, to the Chinese biotechnology sector. Biotechnology development in China originates from state-sponsored programs. Chinese biotechnology research capacities experience fast growth. The state funding plays a crucial role in the latecomer situation. Geographically, biotechnology industries are concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other major cities. The state promotes biotechnology development. However, such a model has its problems: the lack of sustained funding and under-developed venture capital, weak link between research and industry, and under-performed IP output. Faced with the funding constraint, contract research organizations (CROs) have recently become proliferated. Despite the strong role of state, we conclude that the Chinese model of biotechnology innovation is a hybrid one, rather than the classical one of developmental state, which combines various elements of different models.

The question of 'R&D specialisation' has emerged as an issue of debate on the research policy agenda. But what is this question and why should we bother with it? The question boils down to whether, for any given geographical-political entity, there are benefits to having R&D efforts concentrated (or specialised) in a limited number of thematic areas and, if so, whether (a) public funding of R&D should focus on these areas accordingly and (b) corporate R&D investment should be steered towards these areas through structural changes to the economy (and how to achieve this). To explore this question and examine its implications for policy, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, together with DG Research, organised a workshop in Barcelona on 30 June 2008. This report is an edited compilation of contributions submitted by participants at this event., JRC.J.3-Knowledge for Growth