Special Issue on University Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer: A Comparison of U.S. and European University-Industry Relations in the Life Sciences

We draw upon diverse datasets to compare the institutional organizational of upstream life science research across the United States and Europe. Understanding cross-national differences in the organization of innovative labor in the life sciences requires attention to the structure and evolution of biomedical networks involving public research organizations (universities, government laboratories, non-profit research institutes, and research hospitals), science-based biotechnology firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We use network visualization methods and correspondence analyses to demonstrate that innovative research in biomedicine has its origins in regional clusters in the U.S. and in European nations. But the scientific and organizational composition of these regions varies in consequential ways. In the United States, public research organizations and small firms conduct R&D across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of the development process. Ties within and across these regions link small firms and diverse public institutes, contributing to the development of a robust national network. In contrast, the European story is one of regional specialization with a less diverse group of public research organizations working in a smaller number of therapeutic areas. European institutes develop local connections to small firms working on similar scientific problems, while cross-national linkages out of European regional clusters typically involve large pharmaceutical corporations. We show that the roles of large and small firms differ in the U.S. and Europe, arguing that the greater heterogeneity of the U.S. system is based on much closer integration of basic science and clinical development. This research was supported by grants from the Association for Institutional Research (Grants # 99-129-0, 00-129-1, Jason Owen-Smith, PI), the National Science Foundation (Grant # 9710729, W.W. Powell & K.W. Koput, PIs), the Merck Foundation (EPRIS Project, F. Pammolli PI), the European Commission (Contract # SOE1-CT 98-1116, DG 12-SOLS: ESSY Project). We are grateful to audiences at Georgia Tech, Columbia University, the University of Gothenberg, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris, the NPRNet Workshop in Paris, and the comparative workshop at Stanford’s IIS for useful feedback. We thank Ashish Arora, Paul David, Bronwyn Hall, Hannah Kettler, Georg Kruecken, Kenneth Pavitt, Scott Shane, Deepak Somaya, Ed Steinmueller, and Paula Stephan for their helpful comments. The paper was a fully collaborative effort, authors’ names are listed in chronological order.