The biotechnology industry in Oxfordshire: enterprise and innovation

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of one of the most intensive biotechnology clusters in Europe, Oxfordshire. Its purpose is to examine patterns of development, focusing on the interplay between the characteristics of the industry and its firms, the UK's national innovation system and the locality. It reviews what can be learnt about how this concentration of activity functions by using data from a recently completed study of the Oxfordshire biotech industry. It focuses on the rise of entrepreneurial activity, the relationship between growth and the science base, labour markets, milieu effects and formal institutional and physical infrastructural conditions. It concludes that while Oxfordshire has many favourable features its firms are faced with a number of operating problems including the high costs of housing and business property and shortages of skilled people and risk capital. In approach taken, the paper shifts the balance between the conceptualisations of localities as systems of localised networks to localities as systems of material resources.

Notes

Helen Lawton Smith, Coventry Business School, Coventry University, Email: [email protected]

Although so far the indications of potential realization of exploitation of research into genomics from, for example the Human Genome project are less than encouraging. Therefore CRIC's prediction may not be accurate.

In July 2003 British Biotech merged with Vernalis based in Reading and has closed its Oxford offices.

Using a more restricted definition, OEO (2003) identifies biotech 73 firms. Either way, Oxfordshire has more firms than the whole of the Netherlands and nearly as many as Sweden

Charles and Conway (2001) define spin‐offs as enterprises in which an HEI or HEI employee(s) possess stakes, which have been created by the HEI or its employees to enable commercial exploitation of the knowledge arising from academic research.

Buses to Heathrow leave Oxford every 20 minutes and the journey takes about an hour.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Lawton Smith

Helen Lawton Smith, Coventry Business School, Coventry University, Email: [email protected]