A global biotechnology perspective: Scientific American worldVIEW scorecard

Yali Friedman writes that with so many earnest efforts dedicated to growing domestic biotechnology industries, the central question remains: Who is doing what, and how well are they doing it? To shed light on this issue, a team of advisors working with Scientific American, sought to identify the global leaders in biotechnology and to provide a framework that could measure the progress and potential of countries—especially ones that are not currently regarded as world leaders. It is called the Scientific American Worldview Scorecard. Egils Milbergs applauds this effort. "The Scientific American worldVIEW team has put forward a sophisticated approach to innovation benchmarking and metrics. This kind of analysis can lead to better informed science, technology and innovation policies at the national and regional level."

 

Download a PDF of Scientific American Worldview (3.9 MB)

 

Although numerous broad regional rankings exist, often comparing the United States, Europe and Asia, this project's goal was to dig deeper into the innovation potential of individual nations and the multiple factors that should be taken into consideration. For example, size must be considered and contextualized (especially as the United States is larger than any single European nation). Moreover, regions such as Europe and Asia consist of numerous politically and economically distinct countries. So rather than simply comparing gross productivity—the population and economic differences among countries limit the relevance of such a crude measure—this report investigates and enumerates the factors promoting and impeding biotechnology innovation. Furthermore, biotechnology activities are not restricted to the manufacture of products; many companies are active in services such as contract research, clinical-trial management, consulting and other activities with nontangible outputs. As a result, the data in this report come from diverse measures—including educational attainment of a nation's population and research and development (R&D) funding and activity—to capture the broad array of biotechnology activities and factors supporting innovation.

The results are not a mere ranking of the countries—a basic comparison of national revenues would have accomplished that task. Instead, these results dig more deeply into the elements that impact overall biotech innovation. When examining these data, it is important to consider that a high innovation score does not necessarily mean that a country is producing a lot of biotechnology products. These measures indicate the capacity for biotechnology innovation. This analysis also includes innovation-output measures, which were not used in determining the innovation score. Nonetheless, these outputs—such as public-company performance and market-size measurements—help frame the innovation score.

• A Global Biotechnology Survey [ Worldview Scorecard ]
  
• The Overall Leaders: Innovation-Capacity Scores
• The Category Leaders: 5 Key Benchmarks
• The Top 10
• The Outputs
• Biotech's U.S. Birth