Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia's Developmental State

Preface

ix Preface This book is about betting on commercial biotech development in three key Asian economies: South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. After more than two hundred interviews with informants in the field,over twenty research trips to the region,and countless hours in the library and in front of my computer,I believe the bets that have been made there on biotech have not worked out in the ways that many had earlier anticipated, myself included. When I began this project in 2002,I aimed simply to revisit the idea of the developmental state and to rejuvenate what had become a relatively stagnant debate about political economy among the former newly industrializing countries. I intended to examine how the developmental state had evolved and adapted in the era of knowledge-intensive, science-based industrialization. I expected that the model would have undergone some refinement and adjustment but that its evolution would reflect the next stage of the developmental state. What I did not anticipate, at least initially, was that the developmental state would have retreated altogether, that what I was researching was in actuality innovation beyond the developmental state. In the course of writing this book,I have learned that sometimes things do not work out as you expect them to. Indeed,from the perspective of the economic planner, scientist, or bio-industrial stakeholder in Asia, what had once been a sense of considerable optimism at the beginning of the first decade of the 2000s about the prospects of commercial biotech has now become a dreaded feeling of impending failure. At a 2010 conference at the University of Oxford, a well-informed colleague from Taiwan put it to me bluntly: “Biotechnology is one of Taiwan’s biggest industrial failures.” I personally would not state it quite so starkly, yet I write in the concluding chapter that “over the seven years during which I conducted research in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore for this book, I saw the star that was supposed to be biotechnology dim quite considerably.” Indeed, though billions of dollars have been spent, institutions redesigned, universities and labs reoriented, regulatory regimes implemented, and a considerable amount of political capital expended on succeeding in commercial biotech over the past two decades, x PREFACE Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore still have relatively little, in terms of significant commercial blockbusters,to show for their efforts. Commercial biotech may not be a failure per se, but it has certainly fallen well short of expectations on every measure. And it has severely tested—and as I argue in this book, undermined—the viability of the Asian developmental state model. The arguments developed in this book draw on the metaphor of betting. The postwar developmental state was quite proficient at betting;that is to say, it mitigated the risks of picking and making commercial winners in industrial upgrading. However, betting on commercial biotech innovation in the current era involves a much more profound kind of uncertainty, one in which technological,economic,and temporal uncertainty frustrates decision makers in both their ability and their willingness to make bets with any confidence. Put simply,this book examines how decision makers in what were once smart developmental states have made strategic and expensive bets in areas about which they know very little. And it is precisely this tremendous uncertainty that has hastened the end of the developmental state. Biotech represents an entirely new set of challenges, an entirely new kind of bet. One caveat. The challenge of writing a book about a current and dynamic topic such as biotech is that the researcher must somewhat artificially “end” the empirical analysis at some point. The field research for this book was completed in 2008,after which I spent my time writing the manuscript. In line with the broader arguments in the book about uncertainty, circumstances may have changed in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore since 2008, and indeed, they may have changed quite significantly (though I am doubtful of that). And of course, all errors herein are mine and mine alone. So many people to thank. At the outset, I extend my sincerest gratitude to the many people in Asia who have helped me over the past seven or eight years, from those who met with me, taught me about life sciences, and explained to me the intricacies of venture capital investing, to those who helped arrange meetings and interviews with informants and who suggested readings, to those who challenged me and debated with me. I am especially indebted to my...