Global Knowledge Generation Hotspots: An Overview from Technological Tendencies in Biotechnology

This paper aims to understand the development of innovation clusters and hotspots of cutting-edge research in Biotechnology across the world, clusters understood as segments of an innovation system, gathering research institutes, universities, startups, enterprises and funding actors; and hotspots defined as clusters focused on frontier R&D, with economic high potential. The choice of Biotech as study object embeds the special characteristics of this branch of science: long term research with high uncertainty of results, huge funding and few marketable products. The analysis is based on 18 selected tendencies pointed by European Commission as Radical Innovation Breakthroughs and the frequency of these tendencies in several patent databases, focused on which countries are the main applicants since 2005. As a sub product we observed the change, in the studied range of time, of the main axis of Biotech innovation beyond USA, Europe and Japan. The analytical approach is based on literature review and quantitative screening of patent bases.