4: Education/Workforce

To succeed in the complex field of biotechnology, companies and nations need skilled scientists and other workers for R&D and supportive activities. In addition, many managers at biotechnology companies have advanced degrees, making education an important measure of a country’s capacity for biotechnology innovation. In sum, these human resources serve as inputs that help a country build an innovation-based biotechnology industry.

Around the world, countries and companies worry about having an adequate biotechnology workforce. Very productive regions often face a shortage of workers because the demand outstrips the supply. Likewise, an accessible workforce can grow scarce as worker demand drives up the salaries. By contrast, an emerging region might lack the needed talent altogether.

We base this category of the scorecard on five components. For “post-secondary science graduates per capita,” we used UNESCO figures, divided by the 2010 mid-year population as sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau International Database. For “Ph.D. graduates in the life sciences per capita” and “R&D personnel per thousand employment,” we turned to OECD figures. To create a metric for “talent retention,” we calculated the percentage of a country’s doctoral recipients who did not express definite intentions to stay in the U.S. following graduation there, as reported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. So a lower score in talent retention means that more Ph.D. graduates did express a desire to stay in the U.S., which creates “brain drain” for the home country of those graduates. Not every person who wants to stay in the U.S. after earning a Ph.D. finds an opportunity to stay, so some of those still go home or to another country. For China and India, the question will be: Does brain drain diminish over time? For now, China and India rank second and third, respectively, behind Iran, for the number of Ph.D. graduates who want to stay in the U.S. Conversely, “brain gain” indicates the relative number of international graduate students studying in a country, as reported by the OECD.

To emphasize the connection between these components and a country’s innovative capabilities in biotechnology, let’s focus a bit on brain drain and gain. If a country suffers from significant brain drain, as in the case of China, which received a 0.2 out of a possible 10, it indicates that people who know the country very well—Chinese nationals—don’t think that they have opportunities there and want to go elsewhere. Given the speculation about China’s move toward being a biotechnology leader, its low score comes as a surprise. The same can be said of India, which received 0 out of 10 in talent retention. Of course, a country with strong brain gain—such as the U.S., which topped this component in our list—is viewed as a country where opportunities lie.

These measurements can also exhibit volatile swings, especially in smaller regions. For example, Singapore was ranked second in Education/Workforce in our 2010 edition with a score of 5.94, but fell to 16th this year with a score of 3.00.