largest scientific research charity, the Wellcome Trust, has become highly active in
co-funding with the UK government investments in research infrastructure and basic
exploration research such as the Human Genome and new post-genomic research at
such centres of excellence as the Sanger Research Institute at Cambridge (UK).
Nevertheless, some important parts of the exploration and exploitation infrastructure
remain underdeveloped to varying degrees. In the UK, much emphasis has been
placed upon funding Centres of Excellence. These are relatively few in number and
highly imbalanced between regions and within them. In an earlier paper (Cooke,
2002b) it was shown that implicitly or explicitly policies are set to strengthen specific,
often potentially or actually multi-purpose, sites with the strongest possibility for
elaborating a medical and life sciences knowledge value chain to the fullest extent.
Modelled to some degree on Boston, Cambridge (UK) has been a major recipient of
Wellcome Trust and UK research council funding, complemented by special Treasury
funding to enhance academic entrepreneurship through linkage with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and new investments in hospital
infrastructure, including a Clinical Research Centre, to fill out its emergent
megacentre character. It is well known that Cambridge was already the UK’s leading
biotechnology commercialisation location, consequent on long term cultural change
efforts to stimulate academic exploitation of world class exploration knowledge. A
case in point of the latter is the shift in the Medical Research Council’s Molecular
Biology Institute from essentially giving away Intellectual Property Rights to
discoveries like Monoclonal Antibodies as occurred with Milstein and Kohler’s
discovery, to stimulus for contemporary scientists to become academic entrepreneurs.
Now the MRC lab has some 30 spinout firms, some like Cambridge Antibody
Technologies valued in many millions of pounds on the UK’s technology stock
market.
Yet this process can often be rather unsystematic, as the experience in neighbouring
Oxford, also home to world-leading medical and life sciences research, and to
numerous start-up and more mature biotechnology firms like Oxford Glycosciences,
Oxford Asymmetry and Xenova. A key part of the maturation of exploration into
exploitation knowledge occurs in incubators. Oxford Innovation, under the wing of
the Oxford Trust, a non-profit commercialisation institution, runs Oxford
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