Networks in Commercial Biotechnology

Abstract

Biotechnology is one industry in which there have been a number of instructive quantitative studies on the nature, structure and function of several different kinds of interorganisational ties. Strictly speaking, biotechnology is not a single industry. Rather it is a set of techniques which are applied to the transformation of a number of industries, such as agronomy, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, veterinary science and even waste disposal (Powell and Brantley, 1992; Powell et al., 1996). The core technologies are those of sequencing and synthesising DNA and cell fusion. The cost of many of the basic pieces of apparatus required has fallen significantly in the quarter of a century since these technologies were first developed. In the 1970s and 1980s, when biotechnology first began to be commercialised on a large scale, it represented a major discontinuity in the technological paradigms upon which pharmaceuticals, agronomy and several other industries were working. The emergence of dedicated biotechnology firms (DBFs) in those years therefore threatened the position of the incumbents in the industries where products could be developed with commercial application. Those incumbents responded in various ways to limit that threat and, in some cases, they were relatively successful, although the resulting mature industry structure neither, as many predicted in the 1980s, eliminated the DBF sector nor transformed that sector in an industry with traditional interorganisational relationships (Kenney, 1986).