University–Industry Interactions: the Case of the UK Biotech Industry

Abstract

This paper's focus is on both the geography of entrepreneurship and on industry‐collaborative links internationally, nationally and at the local level in the UK biotech industry, the world's second largest biotech industry. The paper reports on a pilot survey of the UK biotech industry. The survey has two goals: to understand the business goals of the firms and to examine the relative importance of local conditions to the business of biotech. Further evidence on these two themes comes from two studies of Oxfordshire, one of the UK's centres of biomedical science and biotechnology. The first is a survey of the county's biotech firms. The second, of academic spin‐offs, demonstrates how the business of biotech in the UK is intimately tied to the national innovation system, which in turn is dependent upon highly localised elite science which in turn signals to world elites that the region is a hot‐spot for innovation.