The Biomedical Clusters in Ohio and Sweden: An Overview

As explained in Chapter 1, we have chosen to focus our international comparison mainly on the area of biomedicine, defined broadly to include pharmaceuticals (not only those based on biotechnology), medical equipment and supplies, diagnostics, software, and a variety of supporting services. This means that our primary unit of analysis here is a cluster, not a technological system. It is not a technological system because it is not defined solely by a particular set of technologies. Instead, the main criterion for including a particular activity in our analysis is whether it produces goods and services for use in the provision of health care, either directly to patients or indirectly via health care providers (hospitals, clinics, physicians, and so on). Since the unit of analysis is defined from the perspective of the end users, it would be appropriate to refer to it as a competence bloc consisting of parts of several technological systems, including biotechnology, mechanical engineering, information technology, software, and materials. Yet we refer to it in the following as a cluster rather than a competence bloc, since we are more interested in a general overview of the composition, structure, and institutional infrastructure than in the particular actors (customers, innovators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, exit markets, and industrialists) who may convert the cluster into a competence bloc (see further discussion in Chapter 9 in this volume). The main goal of our inquiry is to understand both the similarities and the differences in the development of the biomedical clusters in Ohio and Sweden.