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RSS SubscribeThursday 26th July 2007
BioPolis report on public biotech R&D released
by EC
To gain a better understanding of what is happening in the dynamic field of biotechnology in Europe, the European Commission has published the BIOPOLIS study on public biotechnology R&D in 32 European countries. The first aim of BioPolis is to provide an up-to-date and detailed overview of national and regional biotechnology policies and policy instruments for the period 2002–2005 in all EU Member States, four Accession Countries, and Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. The second aim is to assess the effectiveness of biotechnology policies by exploring the relationship between national policy approaches towards biotechnology and the performance of the respective national biotechnology innovation systems.
BioPolis combines qualitative and quantitative methods in order to provide the in-depth overviews of national policy instruments that foster biotechnological growth and performance in science and commercialisation of biotechnology. The overall presentation and cross country analysis of policies, performance, policy dynamics and policy effectiveness in this Final Report is presented separately for the 15 Old Member States plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland (referred to as EU15+3) and for the 10 Member States that joined the European Union in May 2004 (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Cyprus), the two which joined in January 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania) and a further two which are in accession negotiations (Croatia and Turkey), referred to as: NMS and AC.
With respect to the overall performance in biotechnology the analysis shows that the EU15+3 countries can be grouped into three clusters: Cluster 1 with the best performing countries includes Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Cluster 2 performs at a roughly similar level to the European median and includes Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Cluster 3 — Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg — performs well below the European median. Iceland is a special case: due to limited data availability it is not included in the cluster analysis.
Many of the NMS and AC are undergoing significant restructuring and lack adequate public resources to invest in research in general, and in biotechnology in particular. BioPolis has found that they contributed only around 2% of total expenditure on biotechnology research of the 32 European countries covered. This is an underestimate, because complete information on expenditure for some countries is lacking. Nevertheless, even if the complete budget data had been gathered, their share would still remain very low.
The analysis of the effectiveness of specific science base policies seems to indicate that having only generic research stimulating instruments in place is less effective; biotech specific instruments seem to be more beneficial. Most highly performing countries gave equal emphasis to basic and applied research or had some stronger focus on supporting basic research. It is recommended that countries implement a well balanced mix of instruments that target the creation and sustenance of a competitive biotechnology knowledge base and commercialisation. The importance of supporting commercialisation should not lead to policy profiles with an overly heavy accent on these policy goals.
Further information
ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/library/brochures_reports-biopolis_en.htm
