The Craft of Research in Biotech Companies

In contrast to the major multinational pharmaceutical companies, with their roots in the medieval pharmacies where skilled pharmacists could mix their own potions, the biotechnology industry is a more direct outgrowth from university research and more specifically the disciplines of microbiology and biomedicine. Being an industry more or less founded in the 1970s in the US, in the Boston and San Francisco Bay regions, the biotechnology industry has been subject to extensive coverage in both the financial press and in more scholarly settings. Serving the role of being a knowledge-intensive industry par preférénce, biotechnology companies have been treated with great patience as they have failed to deliver either desirable bottom line results or adequate therapies. Like perhaps no other industry, the biotechnology industry has been able to operate for substantial periods of time without being expected to make any major breakthroughs. Today, as the bioeconomy is becoming increasingly fragmented and more research endeavours are taking place in network organization forms, including universities, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies and other industry organizations, the biotechnology companies are increasingly playing the role of sites of expertise that can be tapped and exploited by the major pharmaceutical companies.