The ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen)

Innogen (the UK ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics) began its second five-year phase in late 2007. Innogen, a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the Open University, began in 2002. It belongs to the ESRC Genomics Network, made up of two other centres: Cesagen and Egenis and the ESRC Genomics Forum. From the beginning, Innogen’s aim has been to research the big changes right across the life sciences. We study the new science but also the implications for new technologies and how genomics and post-genomics might change the life science industries – health, crop and animal. Thus, our aim has been to study genomics as an integral part of the life sciences

Issues in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology

Agricultural biotechnology is typically analyzed critically by means of a political ecological focus on the science and its ecological implications - agbio science as a radical, and 'non-natural', break with 'normal' trajectories for 'new plant science'. Surprisingly, less attention has been paid to a range of key political economic issues, many of which were important in the last big food production technology 'revolution', the Green Revolution. This paper will focus on three areas of political economy. First, we discuss the corporate drivers of agricultural biotechnology, and examine whether these drivers have already set the technology so that it cannot be changed. Second, we investigate the present economics and technology of genetic modification in plants, and its possible future. Third, we examine empirical evidence for alternative visions of the technology

Twenty-first century bioeconomy: global challenges of biological knowledge for health and agriculture

Investment in biotechnology has yielded relatively disappointing results and illustrates the gap between the promise and reality of new science. This begs the question: Does research on ‘life’ bring different complexities and uncertainties that act as a barrier to the application of new biology in global health and agriculture? There has been high-quality research on the social and ethical impacts of new biology and on the economics of biotechnology but few systematic and integrated attempts to undertake interdisciplinary research and address these constraints. This paper provides an original empirical analysis of contemporary and future understandings of the bioeconomy using a co-evolutionary and interactive approach to examine the extent to which it may be different from other technological transformations. We focus on the Innogen Centre’s extensive research results on three important and contemporary themes: food and energy security, life science and healthcare translational medicine, and global health

OECD International Futures Project on “The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda”. Health Biotechnology to 2030

This is a report commissioned by the OECD. Innogen was asked to write a scenario report for the OECD International Futures Programme to consider the pathways that health biotechnologies could follow, the future trajectory of the bio-economy primarily in the context of human health and the likely societal, economic and policy impacts of these projected outcomes, focusing on the period 2015 to 2030 . We chose as a starting point a world health care system that, from the perspective of potential impacts of biotechnology, has been mainly under the influence of the innovation model of the multinational drug companies. To date the scope and inventiveness of this model has been constrained by the expensive and lengthy regulatory systems that act as a barrier to entry for small companies that could challenge the industry status quo and our report focuses on the need for regulatory change as a prelude to the emergence of a new, more radically innovative, health care sector. In the absence of such change our scenario predicts a health care sector that is increasingly populated by pharmaceutical commodity producers, research and development focused on incremental, piecemeal change, lack of both public and private sector funding, dysfunctional competition within and between companies and adversarial relationships with regulators. A radical change scenario on the other hand “Networked Health Care” would depend on regulatory agencies collaborating, as an integral component of the innovation system, in the proactive development of new, smarter regulatory approaches to the generation of benefits based on fundamental discoveries in life sciences. Our report describes the pre-conditions needed to lead to the more positive scenario and the roles of key actors in promoting or resisting such changes

Emergency driven capacity building: Covid-19 and the UK's response toward increasing critical testing capability and production of PPE

Covid-19 has forced many countries to rapidly increase their technological capabilities in diagnostics, personal protective equipment (PPE) and medicines. Global shortages of critical equipment and supplies induced by the pandemic have forced countries that traditionally import such equipment and supplies to build and ramp up their indigenous testing capacities and scale up production of PPEs. While shades of a new economic nationalism pervade much of the political discourse in support of this approach, there is surprising institutional variation in the Covid-19 industrial response of supplier countries. When viewed through an innovation system lens, we suggest that this inward focus on domestic capacity and production is actually coupled with intensified global outreach to new and existing suppliers. Contrary to some of the accompanying rhetoric, the actual policy and practice is one where no nation can do it alone. In this way, the pandemic can illuminate the adaptability of innovation systems and the continued importance of external sources of knowledge and resources under emergency conditions. This industrial policy response can also be viewed as largely temporary, although its influence on post-pandemic industrial strategy and future emergency response warrants further inquiry into how it has been implemented in various national contexts. As such, this paper looks at the COVID emergency industrial response of the UK for several reasons. In particular, we look at the UK’s efforts at building their laboratory testing capabilities and for increasing production of PPE. The paper’s early findings present useful building blocks of how industrial innovation systems can effectively respond and adapt, while also exposing some limitations to the innovation systems approach, specifically concerning local health capabilities, production, and delivery

Capacity-building barriers to S3 implementation: an empirical framework for catch-up regions

In this paper, we investigate the implementation challenge of Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) in catch-up regional environments, through the lens of capacity building. We analyse capacity building at two levels: micro-level (individual organisations) and meso-level (regional inter-organisational networks). We use empirical evidence from 50 interviews conducted in the period 2015–2017 from two Greek regions dramatically hit by the economic crisis (Crete and Central Macedonia). We argue that in the Cretan and Central Macedonian context, the difficulty of implementing S3 is directly linked with firms’ lack of adsorptive capability to exploit university-generated knowledge, university knowledge that is too abstract for firm’s to easily acquire, as well as to the capability of regional actors to build inter-organisational networking that fits their strategic needs

Analysing the co-evolution of embedded regulatory capabilities in firms and the state: the case of South Africa’s medical device sector

Regulatory authorities in developing economies not only face challenges regarding their own capabilities, but also have to grapple with heterogeneous levels of technological and innovation capabilities in firms. This paper draws from a firm-level analysis of internally created knowledge, externally sourced knowledge and firm heterogeneity among medical device manufacturers in South Africa to consider the corresponding evolution, development and deployment of regulatory capabilities in firms in their efforts to comply with the country’s health and allied products regulatory authority requirements. From this consideration, the paper explores possible broader adjustments in the country’s medical device sectoral system of innovation which would promote, nurture and embed the desired regulatory capabilities in firms to enable medical device firms to be locally and globally competitive and to contribute optimally to the country’s health sector objectives