Regional science policy and the growth of knowledge megacentres in bioscience clusters

deficiency. It is arguable, judged by Nobel Prizes awarded that Cambridge with
eleven is superior in biosciences to any of the stronger candidates in the USA. But it
is unquestionable that the latter have been more entrepreneurial, even though large
numbers of DBFs everywhere have neither products nor profits.

What does this signify? In an earlier paper, an extensive analysis of the response by
the large number of non-megacentre, even non-bioscience regions in the USA,
Canada and the UK was undertaken (Cooke, 2002b). This showed that fifteen US
States had undertaken science base analyses and developed science strategies with
targets and mechanisms for augmenting their capture of basic science funding in
biosciences. Some piecemeal evidence of the outcomes of these are the statistics that
show universities like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, Stanford and Duke as
occupying highest places in the NIH R&D allocations compared to hitherto. But the
US has also an interesting mechanism for supporting ambitious if underdeveloped
universities in lagging States to access national competitive funding. The EPSCOR
scheme under the NSF competitive bidding procedure for accessing, first programme,
now project funding allows designated States, e.g. Oklahoma and Mississippi to bid
competitively for such bioscience research funding by lowering the grant aid
qualifying bar below that expected of the rest of the USA. This, in EU terms, is a
‘structural funds’ mechanism within the Framework Funds and it has produced
generally positive rather than futile results in the USA.

In Europe, some regional bodies have begun to develop regional science strategies,
most notably Scotland that identifies its £800 million R&D spend annually and seeks
to augment it through intra-regional collaboration and the furtherance of existing
science-funding mechanisms. Medical and Biosciences are two if the three funding
areas to be targeted. In Finland a central government policy of seeding regional
Centres of Expertise, and later, Centres of Excellence has produced up to six regional
bioscientific Centres of Excellence that follow the US system of linking exploration
to exploitation but through largely public rather than private knowledge exploitation
mechanisms. Regional governance institutions are now somewhat more aware now
than they were until only very recently, that health is a large part of their economy,
that it links directly to some of the most exciting science being done in the world
today, and that as well as making a direct economic contribution through purchasing

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