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

3. The Capabilities of Dedicated Biotechnology Firms

In the ‘capabilities’ perspective on firms, and, it may be added, regions that are the
knowledge-embedded platforms in which such firms are rooted, it is dynamic
capabilities that are the most prized. This is helpful because in the literature on
‘knowledge spillovers’ it is the dynamic rather than static externalities with which
they are associated that are equally highly prized (Feldman & Audretsch, 1999).
There is an interesting debate, dating from the work of Jane Jacobs (1969) about
whether it is the diversified or specialised nature of capabilities in knowledge
spillovers that gives the basis for innovatively successful milieux. Jacobs argued in
favour of diversification, new combinations of capabilities giving rise to cognitive
progress, something with which Feldman & Audretsch broadly agree. But researchers
such as Glaeser et al. (1992) and Griliches (1992) stressed the superiority of
specialisation and the capabilities of fairly narrow ‘communities of practice’ (Seely
Brown & Duguid, 2000), known elsewhere as ‘epistemic communities’ in delving
deeply and reasonably rapidly into a particular scientific sub-field. Empirically both
showed how relatively geographically circumscribed knowledge-exploitation, for
example through patenting activity actually was. More recently though, Galison
(1997) moving well beyond the narrow confines of patenting activity such as that
relied upon by Griliches, showed convincingly that new developments in scientific
method, broadly consistent with the emergence of ‘transdisciplinarity’ in Mode 2
knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994) are built fundamentally on
diversification of knowledge.

This feature of contemporary ‘complexity’ in knowledge management specifically
occurring in industrial clusters is the subject of a path-breaking book edited by Curzio
& Fortis (2002). In a contribution that focuses precisely upon the issue at hand, the
following observation is made by one contributor:

‘.... innovation, and problem solving generally, depend on disciplined
comparisons of alternative solutions, and these in turn require transforming
tacit knowledge into what might be called pidgin formalisations: accounts
sufficiently detailed to be recognisable to those who know the situations to
which they refer first hand, but sufficiently abstracted from them to be
accessible to outsiders, from various disciplines,’ (Sabel, 2002).

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