How Can We Reap the Fruits of Academic Research in Biotechnology? in Search of Critical Success Factors in Policies for New-Firm Formation

Abstract

There is often a gap between the creation of knowledge and the use of new knowledge in the economy, a situation which has pushed many governments to establish programmes for knowledge transfer and new-firm formation. I examine the initiatives taken by the government in the Netherlands to advance new-firm formation in biotechnology. Drawing on experience in entrepreneurship—its institutional setting in general, and more specifically on developments in biotechnology start-ups—I aim to identify critical success factors for this policy. The policy seems promising in covering all development stages of start-up firms and in using a network approach—with implementation by an intermediary organisation as a solution for coordination problems. The low popularity of entrepreneurship, including some negative regulatory factors in biotechnology, and the danger of the policy focusing on the top innovative start-ups are threats to success. Other threats may be a fragmentation of ferees and a narrow focus on a national situation rather than cooperation with adjacent countries. I suggest a number of critical success factors that can be used in policies to enhance new-firm formation in biotechnology, and indicate some lines for further research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.