TY - JOUR
T1 - Demographics, innovative outputs and alliance strategies of Canadian biotech firms
AU - Levitte, Yael M.
AU - Bagchi-Sen, Sharmistha
N1 - Funding Information:
Axela Biosensors is a small firm, founded in 2001 by Dr Cynthia Goh, of the University of Toronto. In 2006, the firm reported 28 employees and a sales’ range of $200,000– $500,000. The firm provides products that accelerate the validation of protein biomarkers from discovery into routine clinical use (from company website). Its headquarters are located in downtown Toronto, in close proximity to the University of Toronto and a number of research hospitals (e.g. Mount Sinai Hospital, The Hospital for Sick Children or the Center for Addiction and Mental Health). The company also has representatives in the US and Canada and is looking to expand in Europe and Asia. Cynthia Goh, the company’s founder, is a professor at the University of Toronto Chemistry Department as well as the Institute of Medical Science. She is also the associate director of the Institute for Optical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Goh served as Chief Scientific Officer of the company until 2004. The firm’s strong links the University of Toronto go beyond its inception. In July 2007, the company announced a further commercial partnership with Goh and Dwayne Miller, a physics and chemistry professor at the University’s “BioOptics: Transformative Technologies for Life Sciences Project”, which was awarded a $7.8M grant through the Research Excellence programme of the Ontario Research Fund. This kind of partnership asserts our survey findings that small biotech firms partner with university collaborators to access federal funding. The ability to decrease the commercialization time span is a clear advantage for the university partner: There is knowledge that exists in advanced research labs in the university that has traditionally taken far too long to reach end users and start making an impact. By focusing on commercialization and company partnerships from the start, the goal is to get our discoveries out into the “real world” on a much shorter time scale. (Miller press release, as reported in Axela Biosensors Inc., 2007)
Funding Information:
Bagchi-Sen acknowledges research support from the National Science Foundation (0096605) and The Canadian Embassy in Washington DC.
PY - 2010/5
Y1 - 2010/5
N2 - This paper focuses on the characteristics of biotech firms that consider alliances as critical to the innovation and commercialization of biotech-based products. First, we consider alliances with both universities and industries. Next, we examine attributes for those firms who consider proximity to universities as critical compared with others that do not put high value on physical proximity. Our study is informed by the literature on the biotechnology industry as well as studies on absorptive capacity, alliances and clusters in exploration and exploitation of knowledge, research and technologies. We analyse data based on a 2002 survey of Canadian biotech firms and find that while collaborative arrangements with universities are the most common among our sample firms, those who assign a high value to such linkages are not necessarily always the biotech firms experiencing commercial success.
AB - This paper focuses on the characteristics of biotech firms that consider alliances as critical to the innovation and commercialization of biotech-based products. First, we consider alliances with both universities and industries. Next, we examine attributes for those firms who consider proximity to universities as critical compared with others that do not put high value on physical proximity. Our study is informed by the literature on the biotechnology industry as well as studies on absorptive capacity, alliances and clusters in exploration and exploitation of knowledge, research and technologies. We analyse data based on a 2002 survey of Canadian biotech firms and find that while collaborative arrangements with universities are the most common among our sample firms, those who assign a high value to such linkages are not necessarily always the biotech firms experiencing commercial success.
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U2 - 10.1080/09654311003593986
DO - 10.1080/09654311003593986
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:77953588431
SN - 0965-4313
VL - 18
SP - 669
EP - 690
JO - European Planning Studies
JF - European Planning Studies
IS - 5
ER -