Genomics and bioinformatics are transforming wide
areas of scientific, technological and economic activity. New
areas of innovation are opening up across the life science industries,
agriculture and food provision. But at the same time, there are
high levels of uncertainty of how, when, and where new markets,
products, and services will emerge. Early expectations from genomics
as the 'key to life' of many organisms have subsequently been
seen to be too simplistic, with intervening complexity at every
level from genome to organism (transcriptome, proteome, metabolome).
In pharmaceuticals, the promised systemic shortening of innovation
pipelines remains a promise. In agrigenomics, developments have
largely remained at the primitive stage of enabling specific chemicals
to be sprayed on specific crops. An informatic explosion of data
and problems of interoperability within and between these different
biological levels, present new challenges. In the context of this
uncertainty, there are many alternative firm strategies, shifting
boundaries and interchanges between public and private sectors,
and pre-competitive co-operation. New classes of economic agent
appear and disappear, or in the case of an Incyte or a Celera,
change economic function.
Moreover, the development of these alternative institutional
innovation trajectories have a geopolitical significance and specificity.
The different major centres of gravity in the US, Europe and Japan
also reveal forms of competition and diversity. The significance
of Brazilian genomics and bioinformatics is that distinctive processes
of innovation are being instituted that have achieved global leadership
in specific domains and applications, linked to the needs and
socio-economic interests of the country. The paper reports ongoing
research on the sugar transcriptome, bacterial genomics and models
of pathogenesis, and structural genomics of leishmaniasis, as
examples of these processes.
The paper concludes by arguing that distinctively
instituted and distributed innovation processes lead to processes
of variation and comparative advantage in an area of rapid institutional
change and increasing complexity of organisational interactions.
[View
Paper] [Back
to CRIC Papers]
Centre
for Research on Innovation and Competition
