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Sub-national technology policy and commerce: evaluating the impacts of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

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Abstract

In the last 20 years, state governments have funded a large number of science-based economic development programs. Remarkably, there have been few evaluations of either their economic impact or their prospects for economic impact. The 2004 decision by California voters to issue bonds to fund $3 billion of research on human pluripotent stem cells is an ideal case study for introducing an evaluation methodology for the progress by state programs in developing and transferring research results. In the process of evaluating the California stem cell initiative, we make three methodological contributions to the study of the impacts of sub-national science-based economic development programs. First, the following data sources are introduced as indicators of the prospective economic benefits of these programs: changes in targeted federal research funding, patenting, small business investment research grants, venture capital investment, new firm formations, and clinical trials. Second, the use of regional or industrial controls is introduced. In the case study of the California stem cell initiative the regional control is the comparison of the two dominant California stem cell research and firm clusters, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, to the other dominant cluster, Boston. The biotechnology industry, as a whole, is used to control for exogenous shocks such as changes in the overall interest in new life science technologies. Third, because technology transfer is predicated upon commercialization, a value chain perspective can visualize commercialization obstacles. In this study, a stylized human stem cell therapy value chain is compared to the existing biotechnology value chain and the differences suggest areas where human stem cell therapies are likely to face difficulties. The discussion and conclusion evaluates the progress of the California stem cell initiative and suggests that the evaluation methodology developed can improve the evaluation and guidance of science-based economic development programs.

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Fig. 1

Source Analysis by University of Bordeaux GREThA researchers, July 2015

Fig. 2

Source University of Bordeaux GREThA, July 2015

Fig. 3

Source SBIR.gov, accessed March 9, 2015

Fig. 4

Source SBIR.gov, accessed March 9, 2015

Fig. 5

Source Thomson VentureXpert

Fig. 6

Source Thomson VentureXpert and authors’ data

Fig. 7

Source Thomson VentureXpert and authors’ data

Fig. 8

Source U.S. Clinical Trial Registry

Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Hegde and Sampat (2015) show that in the case of orphan diseases that the influence of advocates exists but did not have a large impact on research choices.

  2. For a discussion of this campaign and the decisions one of the leading stem cell scientists made to advocate and secure passage of the proposition funding the CIRM, see Goldstein (2010, 2011).

  3. The passage of Proposition 71 led to a major burst of philanthropic funding of SC facilities in California (Walshok and Shapiro 2015).

  4. Federal statistics report SBIR grants by department, and the NIH is in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Fortunately, NIH funding comprises nearly all HHS research funding. The SC SBIR grant data includes individual firms only once, though many firms receive multiple grants. In the HHS data, due to the enormous number, these are simple counts not curated to include each firm only once. For this reason, the data are not strictly comparable. Due to the large number, this should have little impact on the aggregate comparisons.

  5. Oddly enough, the CIRM gave the grant to Caladrius, although it was a New York firm that had opened a branch in Irvine, CA (Caladrius Biosciences 2015).

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge partial financial support from Americans for the Cure. We acknowledge the helpful comments of Steven Casper, Al Link, Josh Shapiro, Mary Walshok and one anonymous reviewer. However, all the arguments, analysis, and conclusions are entirely the responsibility of the authors, and none of them should, in any way, be attributed to the sponsors or commentators acknowledged here.

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  1. Community and Regional Development, Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Martin Kenney & Donald Patton

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Correspondence to Martin Kenney.

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Kenney, M., Patton, D. Sub-national technology policy and commerce: evaluating the impacts of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. J Technol Transf 43, 47–68 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-017-9580-1

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