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2: Intensity

To assess a country’s overall efforts to drive biotechnology innovation, we merge seven characteristics into a measurement called Intensity. This category arises from a series of relative measurements that normalize the data for population size and overall economy. Consequently, our Intensity category enables readers to compare large countries to each other, and it identifies small countries with strong biotechnology activities. In short, think of Intensity as a relative measurement of a country’s biotechnology activity. Rather than measuring an output, like a market activity, Intensity measures input. Consequently, countries that score strongly in this category could make great places to do biotechnology research or to look for partners.

Several of the components of the Intensity metric rely on public biotechnology company data that come from company disclosures and published information (Huggett, B., Hodgson, J., Lähteenmäki, R. 2010. Public biotech 2009—the numbers. Nature Biotechnology 28:793–799). For the “public biotechnology companies per capita” and “public biotechnology company employees per capita” components, we divided the company and employee counts, respectively, by the 2010 mid-year population as sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database. For “public biotechnology company revenues per GDP,” we used the 2009 GDP as sourced from the IMF World Economic Outlook Database. The data for three other components—“biotech patents per total patents” (filed with the Patent Cooperation Treaty), “biotechnology venture capital per GDP” and “biotechnology R&D per total R&D”—came from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As the last component of the Intensity category, we calculated the “proportion of public companies” from the number of public companies (as derived from Huggett et al.) and the sum of public companies and private companies (derived from the OECD Biotechnology Statistics Database, December 2010).

Such data prove difficult to gather for some of the countries in our list. In fact, we could not compile information in this category for eight of them: Argentina, Chile, Lithuania, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Thailand.

In combining all seven components into an Intensity index, the real surprise comes from Denmark, which landed at the top of this index. One might expect the leader in biotechnology Intensity to be the U.S. or a legacy pharmaceutical country, such as Germany or Switzerland. Instead, Denmark operates in a different space. Rather than focusing on pharmaceuticals, this country leverages its skill set and infrastructure in fermentation. In addition, Denmark made a big jump from an Intensity score of 3.01 in 2010 to 7.14 in 2011.

In biotechnology, though, water-cooler talk often points at China as the next hot country. Nonetheless, it finished 38th on this list, with an Intensity score of just 0.16—only slightly better than its 2010 score of 0.14. Keep in mind, though, that Intensity is a relative score. As the world’s largest country, however, China’s low Intensity can still produce a large output due to the country’s sheer size.