ABSTRACT
Taking the life sciences seriously as a sector raises the question of why it is spread so unevenly. And in my case, this is as relevant for the UK as anywhere. A considerable amount of academic research has sought to explain this uneven development and, more specifically, its concentration in specific places (for reviews see Feldman 1999; Senker 2005; Birch 2007a). As discussed in the last chapter, the theories can be crudely split in a number of different research agendas. For example, early research on the life sciences drew on strategic management theories to explore the importance of collaborations in the life sciences sector and can be seen as firm-centred approaches. The more system-centred research in the field of innovation studies and political economy focused on the importance of sectoral and institutional conditions to the life sciences. A final set of clustercentred approaches – perhaps the most influential – drew on the work of Michael Porter (1990) and Bracyzk et al. (1998), although the latter’s distinct and more sophisticated regional innovation system approach also incorporates a systems perspective. Despite the respective insights of these different research agendas, there are a number of gaps in their analysis. More recent approaches in economic geography, for example, have highlighted the importance of local-global linkages for life sciences firms (e.g. Gertler and Levitte 2005; Birch 2008; Birch and Cumbers 2010), which I will come back to in the following chapter.
