Intellectual Capital and Its Commercialization: Institutional Context and Information Dilemmas in Biotechnology

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In the early development of the biotechnology industry, new contexts of biotechnology firms were created, joining the university lab, while at the same time old contexts of pharmaceutical and chemical firms were largely pushed aside. Understanding these changes is important to explaining where the industry may go in the future, as well as in understanding growth of other science-based industrial developments. Zucker and Brewer propose to study and explain the rate of founding and the geographic location of new biotechnology firms as a function of available intellectual capital and the dual membership of founders in firms and universities, as well as the phenomenon of new biotechnology firms spinoffs and the extent to which scientific knowledge remains public or becomes proprietary. They also propose to model the productivity of scientists as a function of a variety of individual and contextual factors. They will combine a number of different data bases to obtain information and make use of innovative modeling techniques that combine partial likelihood and multi-level analytical methods. To estimate these models, detailed micro-level data must be collected, as well as data on the organizations and cities and regions within which the individual-level scientific discovery and application takes place. Implications of this research include improved understanding of the discovery/application process, the effects of institutional context on that process, and the changing character of knowledge flow that follows from commercialization and the increase in proprietary pressures.