The biotechnology industry in Oxfordshire: enterprise and innovation

This paper presents a case study of one of the most intensive biotechnology clusters in Europe, Oxfordshire. Its purpose is to examine patterns of development, focusing on the interplay between the characteristics of the industry and its firms, the UK's national innovation system and the locality. It reviews what can be learnt about how this concentration of activity functions by using data from a recently completed study of the Oxfordshire biotech industry. It focuses on the rise of entrepreneurial activity, the relationship between growth and the science base, labour markets, milieu effects and formal institutional and physical infrastructural conditions. It concludes that while Oxfordshire has many favourable features its firms are faced with a number of operating problems including the high costs of housing and business property and shortages of skilled people and risk capital. In approach taken, the paper shifts the balance between the conceptualisations of localities as systems of localised networks to localities as systems of material resources.