Private and public appropriation of biotechnology

Introduction and objectives
Biotechnology is one of the key enabling technologies and has become a driving force of dramatic changes of the innovation process in various sectors. Not surprisingly, the promotion of biotechnology has been on the agenda of nearly every European country since the 1990s.

The development and implementation of biotechnology is rather di-verse across countries and also within countries. This could be explained partly by his-torical, geographical, economic or demographic factors. However, governmental policy approaches are an important key for understanding why biotechnology shows such large differences in growth patterns between countries.

In a recent EU-funded research project - BioPolis - Fraunhofer ISI together with TNO and SPRU has explored in detail how European countries promote biotechnology via public funding activities. This in-ventory of public policy approaches was complemented by a broad set of biotechnol-ogy performance data in order to put the national promotion activities into perspective. Based on these two data sets - policy input and output measures - general conclusions on the effectiveness of various policy approaches have been drawn within the BioPolis project.
Based on this research we propose to analyse in detail on a country level how public policy in general and policies targeting public research institutions such as universities and non-university organisations in particular contribute to the appropriation of biotech-nology by national innovation systems.
Approach
We suggest to explore these questions by a case study approach covering four Euro-pean countries, namely Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, and Germany. In a first step the level of biotechnology appropriation in these countries will be explored. As a proxy for the degree of appropriation, performance data as elaborated in the BioPolis project will be used. In particular, the following indicators are available:
• Number of PhD students in life sciences
• Share of biotechnology publications in all publications
• Number of biotechnology publications
• Citations to biotechnology publications
• Data on the thematic specialisation of biotechnology publications
• Number of biotechnology patent applications over biotechnology publications
• Number of biotechnology patent applications
• Number of biotechnology firms
• Amount of venture capital invested into biotechnology

All these indicators are provided as relative indicators where the absolute scores are related to a denominator reflecting the size of each country. All in all, the data cover 32 European countries - 27 EU Member States, 2 accession countries, Iceland, Nor-way and Switzerland - for the period 2002 to 2005.
Based on the individual performance measures, the 32 countries could be classified into certain performance clusters. This allows to position the four countries to be con-sidered in the proposed project within specific performance categories reflecting the degree of biotechnology appropriation.

In a second step the role of policy-making in the appropriation of biotechnology is ex-plored in detail on a country level. The BioPolis project provides data on the following variables:
• The configuration of the national policy-making systems: institutions and actors in-volved in policy-making; interaction between individual components of the policy-making systems
• Biotechnology funding: budgets, funding goals and priorities, types of funding in-struments, features of the instruments in terms of target groups or coverage of pol-icy goals or biotechnology areas being promoted
Based on this information we propose to elaborate clusters of countries in terms of their policy input towards strengthening biotechnology. This would allow to position the four countries included in terms of their policy input.
In a third step we propose to explore on a country level
• why certain policy input and performance output patterns exist,
• how the policy input contributes to the appropriation of biotechnology,
• and which role public research institutions play in this context.

These questions will be analysed firstly via desk research using the information avail-able through the BioPolis project and additional literature. Secondly, interviews with representatives of the policy-making systems in each country and the target groups of any policy action will be carried out. Among the target groups we differentiate between industrial actors, in particular small and medium-sized biotechnology firms, and public research institutions with a focus on universities.
We suggest that each of the participating countries elaborates on these questions in its respective home country.

As an output of this research we expect firstly a detailed picture on policy approaches towards furthering biotechnology on a country level and on how such approaches work under certain conditions. Secondly, we expect deeper insights into the role of universi-ties in the process of biotechnology appropriation.