Concentrating on the Key Categories

Biotechnology consists of many components that cross a range of disciplines. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service defines it as “the use of biological processes of microbes, and of plants and animal cells for the benefit of humans.” Broad as that definition is, it fails to include many facets of the field. Indeed, putting biological processes to use to help humans also involves basic and applied research in agriculture, biofuels, pharmaceuticals and more, as well as projects involving economics, government policy and sociology. Consequently, no simple metric separates the thriving biotechnology countries from those on the edge of extinction.

Like an organism composed of multiple parts that function on a diversity of scales, both spatial and temporal, biotechnology can be investigated from countless perspectives. Moreover, no matter what metric a study selects for measuring a region’s capabilities in biotechnology, that metric can be divided into various components. Zooming in to explore one of those components more closely will reveal strengths and weaknesses. A nation, like an animal, can excel at some capabilities and falter on others. Nonetheless, the poor swimming skills of a hawk do not limit its abilities to see details from a great distance or soar across the sky. Likewise, most countries perform better on some biotechnology metrics than others.

For a more comprehensive view of biotechnology worldwide, this report builds a scorecard on a foundation of key categories: Intellectual Property (IP), Enterprise Support, Intensity, Education/Workforce and Foundations. Like nesting Russian dolls, a series of parts lie within each of these five categories. For example, Enterprise Support, as measured here, examines several factors: business friendly environment, biotechnology venture capital, capital availability, and biotechnology venture capital availability. Even for a country that might not seem like a biotechnology powerhouse, these components can reveal special strengths to leverage and weaknesses that need special attention.

To quantify the information, we ranked each country’s performance in the individual components on a scale from 0 to 10, with the lowest-ranked country scored as 0 and the highest-ranked country scored as 10. To assign a score for each category, we calculated the mean score from the components.

Depending on the metrics, the activities of large economic powers can overshadow the important strides made by smaller ones. For balance, the data used to build the Scientific American Worldview Scorecard include both gross and relative metrics. This enables a country’s absolute performance to play some role in determining its position on this scorecard while allowing comparative measurements to count as well.

As you explore the following pages, remind yourself of the importance of the separate pieces that make up a nation’s overall capabilities and successes in the field of biotechnology. In short, the component scores paint a picture of a country’s biotech environment—depicting its standing on a range of crucial factors. These factors are intimately involved in predicting its ability to power innovation. A company exploring the possibility of international expansion might use certain component scores to gauge a country’s market opportunities or others to evaluate the challenges of working there. In many instances, the individual component scores provide a depth of information that cannot be appreciated in the composite scorecard, where averaging blurs some of the key differences.