Intellectual Human Capital and the Birth of US Biotechnology Enterprises

Abstract The number of American firms actively using biotechnology grew rapidly from nonexistent to over 700 in less than two decades, transforming the nature of the pharmaceutical industry and significantly impacting food processing, brewing, and agriculture, as well as other industries. Here we demonstrate empirically that the commercialization of this technology is essentially intertwined with the development of the underlying science in a way which illustrates the significance in practice of the localized spillovers concept in the agglomeration literature and of the tacit knowledge concept in the information literature.