part0011

The stage has been set, in the labs and government halls of several nations, many researchers say. In the future, no matter which group of scientists, states, or nations pulls into the lead or falls behind in the area of regenerative medicine, there will probably always be another group just behind it, to pick up the slack and carry on. Too many people, from too many different walks of life, have become besotted with the notion that the secret to curing the body has essentially been hiding within the body, all along.

The race is on. Ever since the rediscovery in the 1970s of the biological heuristic, which prompted the faint and distant hope for a new generation of cutting-edge health technologies, the world has focused tremendous attention on the promise of commercial biotech. And this preoccupation with biotech, broadly defined, has been truly global in scope. Rich countries expect innovative life sciences to be the next foundational pillar of the knowledge economy. Poor countries see biotechnology as the technological harbinger of low-cost medical miracles, alleviating their dependencies on expensive first-world drugs. 1 It was initially believed, naively, that all it would take to realize the biotech revolution was some serious smarts in the lab, some investment savvy, a whole lot of government support, some patience, and a receptive public. Turns out, however, as we now know, that commercial biotech was a long-shot bet from the start, and that the current skepticism surrounding the sector and its underwhelming impact in terms of economic returns and health outcomes is not unwarranted. In a way, this book serves as a cautionary tale, a realistic wake-up call at the least, about the tremendous uncertainties of biotech innovation and the commercialization of cutting-edge life sciences technologies.

Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, three of the world’s most dynamic postwar economies, have bet large on the promise of commercial biotech. They were, in one sense, compelled to do so, as their earlier competitive and comparative industrial advantages had begun to erode during the 1990s in the face of competition in industrial manufacturing from other, later developers in the region and beyond. Their economies were gradually being hollowed out. In addition, the global economic crisis of 2008 emphatically underscored just how dependent Asia’s postwar export-led strategy had been on a buoyant American economy, which for the previous several decades had acted as the de facto purchaser of last resort. Absent a healthy American core of the global economy, the margins in price competition in industrial manufacturing sectors become even smaller. Industrial Asia’s dependence on cost-competitive manufacturing exports has proved to be its Achilles’ heel. As the Economist recently put it, “Asia’s sails have become anchors.”2 Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore thus had to become science and technology innovators, a direction echoed by the World Bank in 2003.3 Because they had already demonstrated their success as astute and creative technology absorbers and technology imitators, by the 1990s these dynamic industrial economies were positioned to climb the global technology value chain as creators and cutting-edge innovators. Biotechnology thus became a high priority for industrial planners in all three places.

Notwithstanding the fact that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore had little previous industry and R&D experience in the life sciences field, several factors seemed to suggest at the time that these economies would have a good shot at making it in biotech. They were not industrial technology laggards. They were plugged into the global economy and transnational R&D networks. Governments were committed to facilitating the growth of the industry. The private sector and industry were hungry for new investment opportunities in higher value-added sectors. And all three economies enjoyed what they saw as significant locational advantages as “hubs” and “gateways” for Asian markets and prospective bio-industry partnerships. Besides, the whole world—the rich and poor, the big and small—was getting into the business of commercial biotech. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore would not be outliers in this regard, and they were most certainly not going to be left behind .

But making it in biotech has proven to be very far from a sure thing, even for these three otherwise dynamic industrial economies. Betting in biotech has been very costly. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have invested billions of dollars in the sector, spending at levels on a par with other advanced industrial economies. They have reoriented their science and technology regimes to increasingly focus on basic science research, at the same time deepening domestic capacities to translate upstream discoveries into commercializable products and services. They have struggled to reconfigure their regulatory regimes to align and balance industry’s needs with the nonmarket imperatives of patient safety, bioethics, and health care accessibility. And they have all had to confront the difficult political challenge of sustaining an appetite among stakeholders for the long-term realities of commercial biotech innovation. Biotech innovation has therefore been not only economically costly but politically costly as well. Simply put, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have expended a great deal of political capital on the prospects and processes of commercial biotech development, an extremely high-stakes gamble.

This book examines the biotech bets that have been made by decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and how these bets have been strategically rationalized. In this respect, this book is about the processes of major political economic change and adaptation to a new paradigm of science-based industrial upgrading. It is a book about choices. It looks to clarify what Richard Doner and his colleagues have identified as a major gap in the innovation studies literature: some sense of the “institutional origins” of industrial technology development systems, the choices made, and their political economic rationales.4 It seeks to shed light on what Philip Cerny understands as the adaptive political economic imperatives of the current knowledge-intensive “third industrial revolution.”5 It takes seriously Dani Rodrik’s notion that innovation systems cannot simply be copied from abroad and replicated elsewhere, and that the institutional origins of any such system are shaped by local adaptations and continual experimentation.6 It is inspired by Dan Breznitz’s assertion that “states and societies still have real choices with regard to developing their own rapid innovation-based industries.”7 The accounts presented in this book reveal adaptive processes that have evolved in fits and starts, sometimes bearing the appearance of organizational and strategic anarchy. Change and adaptation have been animated by a nonlinear process of continual learning by doing. Mistakes have been made, gambles have been lost, and lessons have been learned. Indeed, at times it has even appeared that betting on biotech in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore has proceeded in the absence of, rather than according to, some coherent strategic plan, an impression that runs counter to our stylized views of the well-planned and “smart” postwar developmental state.

The postwar developmental state in Asia was indeed well planned and smart. Decision makers made, on the whole, good choices. They bet well. Strategic state interventions facilitated the processes of industrial upgrading in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. They made winners, and even more impressive, they more often than not strategically picked winners in what were key industrial sectors. In other words, the postwar developmental state was both able and willing to provide “big leadership.”8 But as I asserted early on in this book, developmental states also benefited enormously from the advantages of late development. They were the beneficiaries of second-mover advantages, whereby the uncertainties of first-order technological innovations had been managed elsewhere. They were spared the uncertainty and the heavy lifting of creating, reaping at the other end the benefits of creatively copying. Upgrading into the informatics sector, for instance, was driven by the state’s capacity and willingness to broker technology imports, fund technology R&D, and invest directly in sectors and even promising firms to commercialize such technologies. In other words, the developmentally oriented states in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore strategically mitigated the risks of industrial technology upgrading. They turned risky bets into surer bets.

Current prospects in first-order innovation in commercial health biotech and science-based industrialization more generally, however, are considerably more elusive than what the postwar developmental state confronted in mitigating the risks of industrial upgrading. Biotech innovation and commercialization more closely approximate what Frank Knight long ago described as “primary uncertainty,” which he saw as conceptually and empirically distinct from conventional risk scenarios. Whereas risk can be expressed as a probability distribution of known outcomes, primary uncertainty is characterized by those conditions under which there is so little information, data, and knowledge that the calculability of probability is nearly impossible. According to Knight, making strategic choices amid uncertainty amounts essentially to “pure guesswork.”9 The prospects and processes of managing uncertainty are qualitatively different from those of mitigating risk. In this respect, picking winners to make in biotech appears to be a less and less viable strategic option for even the smartest, boldest, and most decisive of developmentally oriented states and bio-industrial stakeholders.

It is not as though we know nothing, however, about biotech and the commercial prospects and processes of life sciences innovation. Rather, it is that even after three decades since the launch of the supposed biotech revolution, we still know so little about the prospects and processes of the commercialization of biotech. The existing stock of knowledge about the sector does not permit the sort of risk calculations once relied on by the developmental state in making industrial policy choices. There simply are not enough success cases globally, never mind in Asia, to draw definitive lessons about the sector. Biotechnology remains a far from mature technology, after all. We still know so little about how to translate upstream knowledge about genetics into applied technologies. We also know very little about the market for biotech products and services, a problem that is compounded by regulatory hurdles. There is much still to be learned about structuring biotech industry and effective business models inside firms. And after more than thirty years since the promise of biotech was first identified, after trillions of dollars invested in the sector and so many of the world’s best minds working in the life sciences field, we still have scant information about when we might expect to see the commercial life sciences revolution really flourish. The prospective development of commercial biotech and the translation of upstream discoveries into commercially viable outputs remain obscured by technological, economic, and temporal uncertainty.

Yet the reality is that in the face of such extraordinary uncertainties, decision makers nonetheless have to make choices. But what choices? And how are such decisions arrived at when so little is known about the prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation? Economists tell us that scale can help. That is to say, if many people work at it long enough and bet widely enough under conditions of uncertainty, then one can, over time, infer some sense of what works and what does not. But this is not an option for most economies, save the United States and perhaps late-developing giants such as China and maybe India. Most economies, of which Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are typical, are without the scale to bet indiscriminately and indefinitely. Rather, decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to bet discriminately. They must make strategic choices when it comes to resource commitments, the allocation of such resources, the aims of industrial policy more generally, and the design of specific regulatory policies.

The theoretical literatures on global, national, and local systems of innovation, varieties of capitalism, and different kinds of production regimes provide analytical leverage with which we can examine how decision makers make strategic choices.10 We know, for instance, that the innovation process involves the development of multiple bases of expertise, which on their own bring little value but when integrated (whether in the form of competition or collaboration) can entail new technological and economic value. We know that person-to-person contact and the density of networks are important for innovation.11 We also know that these processes are mediated through variable institutional configurations. The challenge is in narrowing the gaps between institutionally disparate and multidisciplinary sources of expertise, encompassing the worlds of life science, engineering, finance, management, and the regulatory sciences. But there remains, still, little consensus about what sorts of institutional configurations, organizational forms, or policy strategies are required to narrow these gaps, to promote cutting-edge innovation and the commercialization of biotechnologies. Theory thus provides few clues as to what specific choices decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore ought to make to promote the commercialization of biotech.

Uncertainty about the prospects and processes of biotech industry development notwithstanding, decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to make important choices with respect to the allocation of public and private resources for biotech. Among the three, the choices, as well as the rationales for such choices, have differed markedly. Despite common challenges in managing uncertainty, they have followed different pathways in the allocation of public and private resources and the organization of both the state and bio-industry. Simply put, they have bet on biotech from different strategic points of view.

In Korea, the allocation of public and private resources to commercial biotech over the past two decades has led to a more discernible division of labor among actors involved in the sector. Within the state apparatus, the disbursement of R&D resources dedicated to the life sciences, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars each year, has been spread across the entire spectrum of R&D activities, from upstream basic science research to new, publicly funded biotech transfer mechanisms in the downstream. This vertically expansive division of R&D labor among state actors has been mirrored in the organization of Korea’s emerging bio-industries. It is generally assumed that the future of commercial biotech and life sciences innovation rests with the chaebols, especially in the field of new drug development in biopharmaceuticals. Only the chaebols, along with a handful of local drug manufacturing firms, are thought to have the scale and internal R&D and manufacturing capability to make it in the drug development business. However, while chaebol leadership in growing the sector continues to figure centrally in Korea’s approach to biotech industry development, the evidence presented in Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrates how decision makers there also recognize the imperatives of surrounding the chaebols, such as LG Life Sciences, with a significant supporting cast of dedicated life sciences public research institutes, R&D-intensive small and medium-sized enterprises, and an abundance of venture capital. The logic of the Korean approach to growing commercial biotech has been to broadly diffuse relevant knowledge in the life sciences and biotech industry, but with the expectation that productive linkages will be formed among such knowledge bases over time.

Taiwan’s approach to commercializing biotech is significantly different. Unlike in Korea, the allocation of public and private resources in Taiwan tends to emphasize the midstream and downstream aspects of biotech innovation and commercialization. Within the state, for instance, the majority of public resources dedicated to biotechnology—which accounts for almost one-third of all public R&D spending—is allocated to midstream R&D (i.e., applied technology) and the decentralized development of multiple downstream technology transfer mechanisms for industry. In fact, as I showed in Chapter 2, the allocation of public R&D resources within the state has intentionally fostered a competitive dynamic among state actors, measured explicitly in terms of commercial outputs. I describe this as a “hit-and-miss” logic of resource allocation, a logic that is also reflected in the organization of bio-industry in Taiwan. Bets have been spread. Building on existing strengths in SME development, Taiwan’s emerging biotech industries continue to hinge on the growth of small specialized firms, or what one entrepreneur calls Taiwan’s “many sprouts.” The state has, to some extent, seeded these sprouts. For instance, firms have benefited from, among other things, the state’s efforts to develop transferable technologies in public research institutes such as the Industrial Technology Research Institute, the Development Center for Biotechnology, and the National Health Research Institute. But firms are also expected to generate near-term revenues and attract private sector investment. Many bioventure firms will of course fail. However, there is also an expectation that some will survive, and those will in turn help identify specific areas or niches in the commercial biotech value chain where more investment resources can be allocated by public and private bio-industrial stakeholders.

Singapore’s approach to biomedical industry development could not be more different from Taiwan’s and Korea’s. Given Singapore’s small size and small talent pool in the life sciences sector, decision makers there have focused their efforts on attracting global biomedical firms to the city-state. Singapore’s postwar industrialization strategy rested on the ability of the developmental state to foster the locational advantages with which to attract global capital, such as a disciplined and skilled labor force, tremendous government commitment to infrastructure development, and the use of economic inducements. The Singaporean state allocates public resources for the biotech sector in precisely these ways, in an effort to transform Singapore into a biomedical R&D hub for global firms. The Singaporean strategy is to leverage the international. As I described in Chapter 2, the concentration and centralization of administrative authority within the Economic Development Board and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research during the late 1990s allowed the state to centrally coordinate the allocation of public resources to training and skills development, university research, public research institutes, and bio-industry-oriented R&D programs. Investing in these sorts of locational advantages has paid off somewhat, in that large global biomedical firms are a significant source of industry investment in Singapore’s emerging life sciences industries sector. However, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, most of these investments have been in biomedical manufacturing and therefore have not, as yet, translated into the sorts of high value-added spillovers or externalities expected by the state. Most notably, global biomedical firms have not located their R&D operations in Singapore at the pace and scope originally envisioned by biotech stakeholders there .

The potential payoffs of each of these unique strategic approaches to commercial biotech development are not the focus of this book. Still, we can make some reasoned speculations about them, though with a few caveats at the outset. First, the promise of commercial biotech is uncertain. In this respect, the prospects of a major blockbuster drug or a cutting-edge technological innovation coming out of one of these three Asian economies are similarly uncertain and unlikely any time soon. Second, success depends as much on actual innovative products as it does on the metric used to determine and measure “success.” Indicators from Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have indeed demonstrated continual success and an upward trajectory in biomedical (broadly defined, I should add) industries measured in terms of revenues earned, employment, and life sciences R&D credibility. If we look at investment-to-earnings ratios in the sector, however, then things do not look as good. And if we are to measure success solely in terms of commercialized cutting-edge biotechnological breakthroughs, then we can definitively say that anticipated and hoped-for payoffs have not yet materialized.

Still, looking into the future, one could reasonably conclude that given the existing structures of these economies and their past successes in industrial upgrading, the strategic bets made and the approaches adopted in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore make good sense. Although all three are relatively recent entrants in the life sciences field, they have built on existing industrial strengths, and their strategic choices complement their political economies: Taiwan’s continued experimentation with SME development, Korea’s expectations of chaebol leadership, and Singapore’s efforts to attract global biomedical firms. We have also seen an extraordinary commitment on the part of the state in all three cases to allocate important inputs to the commercial biotech innovation process. Indeed, both public and private bio-industry stakeholders are beginning to put into place the various pieces of the innovation process, to generate and diffuse new knowledge.

One can reasonably imagine, for instance, that biotech SMEs in Taiwan will eventually capture value from exploiting “low-hanging fruit” in the bio-industry value chain, likely not cutting-edge blockbusters but certainly revenue-generating niches. Taiwan is expected, for instance, to do quite well in the design and manufacture of medical devices and other such engineering-based products. Singapore’s attempts to attract global biomedical firms and, most important, their R&D operations might very well succeed in the long run, even if, as I showed in Chapter 3, the pace will be slower than initially hoped. To its credit, in its continued efforts to develop the biomedical and biotech fields there, Singapore has created tremendous buzz for the tiny city-state. And while it will likely take much longer for Korea’s large firms to gain a significant foothold in the global biopharmaceutical market, increasing interest among the chaebols in the life sciences field as well as continued growth in the number of biotech venture firms bode well for the future of Korea’s life sciences industries. One could reasonably assert that of the three economies examined in this book, Korea’s is most likely to succeed in the field of new drug development, even if such prospects, as I have suggested, remain distant and uncertain.

There are, however, several mitigating factors that could derail ongoing efforts to grow commercial biotech industries in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. As I have stressed throughout this book, there remains tremendous technological and economic uncertainty about the sector. Commercial biotech is still very much underdeveloped, not only in Asia but globally. Much of current life sciences research continues to be in the upstream, with the translation of future discoveries into applied and commercializable biotechnologies a still very distant promise. In addition to technological and economic uncertainty, there remains extraordinary temporal uncertainty.

As I showed in Chapter 4, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to confront the prospects of waning national appetites for the long-term realities of developing commercially viable biotech. The sector’s underwhelming performance has exacerbated this feeling of temporal uncertainty. People there are becoming frustrated with the slow pace of commercial growth and some are beginning to reason, understandably, that biotechnology is not worth the patience and investment, especially given other, less uncertain technology industries in which to invest. To stem this growing impatience and to essentially buy more time for the sector, the state has attempted to strategically portray the appearance of progress in commercial biotech development, using important benchmarks to suggest that if not in the short term, then at least in the longer term there are returns that can be realized. Most important, the state in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore has attempted to portray success in the biotech sector by manufacturing “stars.” Not unlike in the past, the state has selectively over invested in certain endeavors—whether a firm, a lab, or even an individual researcher—to ensure, as best it can, its eventual, and more important, conspicuous success. Conspicuousness is critical, in that this strategy is intended above all to revive and then maintain an appetite for the long-term realities of commercial biotech innovation. It remains to be seen how effective this strategy will be and if it can be sustained. Its failure, however, will be politically costly for the state and will likely close the window of opportunity for these economies to make it in commercial biotech over the longer term. Temporal uncertainty illuminates the potential perils of nurturing a sector that in the near term necessarily teeters on the brink of spectacular failure.

Regulatory uncertainty may also derail or slow the development of commercial biotech in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. As I explained in Chapter 5, regulatory policy is an integral aspect of the biotech innovation process. It can both facilitate and constrain bio-industry development. In this way, it functions as de facto industrial policy.12 The evidence presented in this book suggests that the regulatory state in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore has been, on some critical regulatory issues, relatively conflicted among contending interests, priorities, and bases of expertise, despite efforts by state-level decision makers to coordinate regulatory policies. Therefore, rather than a source of regulatory predictability, consistency, and certainty, the emerging regulatory regimes in all three places have demonstrated the opposite qualities. Even in areas of regulation where there has been considerable alignment between market (promoting bio-industry) and nonmarket (protecting patients) imperatives, there remains considerable skepticism about how capable these multiple stakeholder states will be in implementing and enforcing such regulatory policies into the future. The creation of institutional review boards—a critical instrument in the state’s regulatory capacity to oversee clinical R&D—has not, for instance, quieted frustrations among regulators, who point to the inconsistent and uneven implementation and enforcement of the IRB mechanism in Korea and Taiwan. Indeed, efforts thus far to create greater regulatory certainty have been made in anticipation of the growth of bio-industry. In other words, at the moment, some regulatory policies might appear to be consistent, coherent, and certain. However, skeptics point out that only when commercial bio-industry has taken off can we really judge whether these regulatory policies can in fact balance and align contending interests inside the multiple stakeholder state; observers have reason, they believe, to be skeptical.

Decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to make difficult strategic choices in the face of biotech’s extraordinary uncertainties. In some regards, most notably in the allocation of public and private resources for biotech, strategic actors in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have chosen varied pathways and approaches to commercial biotech development. Choices thus reflect distinctive logics and strategic rationales. Korea has chosen to “go big,” Taiwan has decided to “go small,” and Singapore has chosen to “go global.”

What explains the variation in strategic choices? First, path dependency and the legacies of the postwar developmental state era have clearly mattered in determining actors’ choices in the current era of science-based industrialization and biotech innovation specifically. Stakeholders in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have had to bet on the prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation with the “hands” they were dealt. Existing strengths in R&D and structures of industrial organization, financial markets, education institutions, and the organization of the state apparatus have constrained what decision makers are able to do. The processes of political economic adaptation have been shaped by the tug between those decisions for the future and the effects of decisions inherited from the past. Choices have been circumscribed by past choices.

It is no wonder, then, that Korea has staked its bio-industrial prospects on the leadership of the chaebol sector. Likewise, in Taiwan it is not surprising that the existing SME industrial landscape, which is best suited for transferring technology between midstream public and venture firms, has remained the core of the Taiwanese strategy in biotech development. The strategic decision in Singapore to continue to pursue multinational collaboration in technology development has been similarly shaped by earlier strategic decisions. The presence of multinational pharmaceutical firms in Singapore, beginning during the 1980s, virtually locked in this particular approach to commercial biotech development. Divergence in strategic choices among the three, therefore, is a function of the structural and organizational legacies of their unique postwar developmental state experiences.

Second, decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore also differ in terms of how they envision their respective bio-industries fitting in the global bio-industry value chain. In other words, they differ markedly in how they strategically see their eventual integration into the global knowledge economy. Their objectives are different. In many ways, this variation reflects each nation’s political economic worldview and more specifically how it has attempted to manage economic globalization—a worldview that has also been shaped by each place’s postwar experiences in industrialization .

According to stakeholders in Taiwan, there are no illusions that local firms will ever compete in the global biotech scene as serious lab-to-market drug discovery firms. Rather, decision makers in Taiwan understand that the growth of the biotech industry there will depend on finding niches. They recognize that because the commercial biotech value chain is long and segmented, specialization can be an asset, as well as a sector in which Taiwanese firms can capture high value-added returns at key links in the chain. Taiwan’s narrow but potentially lucrative industry objectives in commercial biotech are thus reminiscent of its approach to growing the IT and electronics sectors a few decades back. Korea, on the other hand, aspires to compete globally with other brand suppliers of cutting-edge health technologies, most notably in the area of blockbuster drugs. Though Korean life sciences industries have benefited from the growth of small and increasingly technologically savvy ventures, the primary objective is for these SMEs to support what stakeholders hope will be fully integrated lab-to-market drug firms. Unlike Taiwan, Korean decision makers have bet on capturing much larger segments of the global value chain in commercial biotech, an aspiration for which relative scale and brand recognition are Korea’s competitive advantages. Singapore has chosen to position itself as Asia’s biotech R&D and manufacturing hub by attracting global biomedical firms to the city-state. Recognizing how unrealistic it would be to develop homegrown biotech firms in an economy as small as Singapore’s, stakeholders there have chosen, as in Taiwan, to capture high value-added sections of the global biotech value chain. However, rather than grow domestic firms, as in Taiwan, Singaporean decision makers envision the city-state as eventually becoming an R&D platform for global biomedical firms. In all three places, commercial biotech objectives differ and have in turn shaped differently the development of commercial biotech among them.

Third, the varied approaches to commercial biotech development in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are shaped by each nation’s heuristic biases in managing uncertainty and in dealing with what they know very little about. Under conditions of primary uncertainty—where there is no information or so little that rational decision makers have essentially nothing to base their decisions on—people will nonetheless make choices as though they can in fact reasonably cope with such uncertainty. To do this, they draw on heuristic devices—values, beliefs, cognitive cues, and mental scripts—to help make, and more important to help rationalize, their choices. Generated from within societies, these heuristic devices are normative frames derived from national experiences and repertoires of proven decisions internalized from the past. They are not essentialist cultural predispositions per se (i.e., Asians are less risky, Asians are good savers), but rather they illuminate what is valued and what is shunned in a given society, what people believe they are good at, and what they are comfortable with. They make up belief systems that inform how strategic decision makers manage uncertainty. Of course, these heuristic devices lead to systematic biases and differences in decision making under conditions of uncertainty.13

Informants in Taiwan, when explaining to me the rationale of the hit-and-miss strategy, repeatedly stress the expectation that the vast majority of initiatives in biotech innovation (firms, research programs, labs) will fail. And that, they emphasize, is okay. In fact, it is encouraged. Decision makers there have come to understand widespread failure and high risk taking to be the bases of industrial upgrading, and thus the best approach to technological innovation. The Taiwanese hit-and-miss and “many sprouts” strategies are predicated on the historical normalization of industrial failure and the absorption and spreading of the costs of commercial failure. This inherited heuristic ensures that the social and economic costs of failed initiatives do not discourage future attempts to eventually succeed. Failure is something that Taiwanese “guerrilla” entrepreneurs have learned to be comfortable with, and to even value.

This particular mindset in Taiwan contrasts starkly with prevailing norms and values in Singapore’s political economy. Informants in Singapore, from state officials to local entrepreneurs, all emphasize Singaporeans’ deep-rooted aversion to failure as a barrier to innovative technological entrepreneurialism. Singapore’s postindependence notion of “survivalism” and an enduring discourse of national crisis and vulnerability, combined with a culturally resonant norm of kiasu (saving face, or the fear of losing), have made decision makers there tremendously risk-averse when it comes to strategic choices. The strategy to shift biotech’s uncertainties to foreign firms and to leverage the international reflects this particular belief system.

Korea’s distinctive approach to managing biotech’s myriad uncertainties stems from a different heuristic bias, one that is informed by a different set of historical experiences in industrialization. Korea’s political economy in the postwar period was fiercely nationalistic. In contrast to Taiwan, where local firms continue to exploit narrow segments of global value chains, Korea’s developmental state nurtured its leading firms to become giant, globally branded competitors. Unlike Singapore, which struggled with a profound sense of national vulnerability beginning in the 1960s, Korea’s economic rise was fueled by a technonationalist confidence that sought to emerge and challenge industrial leaders in the West and most notably Japan. Thus, when confronted with the technological and economic uncertainties of commercial biotech development, decision makers in Korea have, not surprisingly, chosen to center their efforts on supporting the continued growth of national champions so they can compete with global leaders in new drug discovery, development, manufacturing, and global marketing. The notion “big is beautiful,” once the mantra of Korea’s postwar chaebols, continues to resonate. To be sure, of the three cases featured in this book, Korea is the only one to have boldly proclaimed its lofty goal of becoming a top global producer of biotechnology by 2010. The Korean script has always been one that privileges the logic of betting big to win big.

We have looked to the past to get a sense of why we see important distinctions among the Korean, Taiwanese, and Singaporean approaches to biotech development. In the face of extraordinary uncertainty, decision makers’ choices are informed—scripted—by the institutional legacies of the postwar developmental state, the current expectations of bio-industrial development, and prevailing heuristic biases and worldviews. In short, when confronted with uncertainty, decision makers tend to choose what they know best and what makes sense to them.

The analysis of biotech innovation in Asia and the processes of managing uncertainty in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore could easily end right there with the conclusion that path dependency—institutionally, organizationally, and cognitively—has informed their distinctive strategic choices and left its imprint on varied national approaches to commercial biotech development. And yet the evidence presented in this book suggests that something deeper is going on, that a more fundamental transformation has been under way in terms of the choices made to support the future prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation in industrial Asia. There is an even deeper story to be told here, but one that has only begun to be articulated by strategic decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. It is also one that is common to all three cases. The unfolding story is about the retreat of the state and, in effect, the end of the developmental state era.

To be sure, the broader political economic context in Asia has hastened the ongoing decline of the developmental state over the past decade and a half. The liberalization pressures of the 1980s and 1990s, mounted primarily by the United States, blunted many of the industrial policy instruments once employed by the developmental state, especially in the areas of finance and banking, strategic trade protectionism and foreign exchange manipulation. Meredith Woo-Cumings writes that “by 1997, Korea was a country bereft of industrial policy.”14 While she overstates her case a bit, Woo-Cumings’s more general observation could also be made of Taiwan during the economic liberalization period of the 1990s. Furthermore, the democratization of Korea and Taiwan during the 1990s supposedly undermined the bureaucratic autonomy of the state, leaving it vulnerable to both political and partisan interference from within the state and from mobilized civil societies and voters. This came into sharp relief when the 1997 financial crisis exposed the postwar developmental states’ weaknesses in managing the new realities of financial globalization and, much worse, the inherently corrosive effects of close and unchecked state-business alliances. The financial crisis illuminated the very fine line between productive cooperation, on the one hand, and unproductive collusion, on the other. The model was delegitimated in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis.15 What is more, the technoglobalist imperatives of the knowledge-intensive economy, especially among those aspiring to be at the cutting edge of innovation, are in opposition to the technonationalist impulses, self-reliance myths, and neomercantilist policies that had legitimated the postwar developmental state. In other words, the developmental state, as we once knew it, was already in decline. What this book suggests is that the challenges of managing uncertainty in science-based industrialization, the next stage in industrial Asia’s economic trajectory, have put the final nail in the developmental state’s proverbial coffin.

The slow death of the developmental state described above has, in many ways, been of a structural nature; that is to say, it is the institutional bases of the state—its bureaucratic autonomy, internal coherence, interventionist instruments, and economic nationalist orientation—that have eroded over time. The evidence presented in this comparative study supports this structuralist take on the decline of the developmental state model. As I described in Chapter 2, both the functionalist imperatives and the multidisciplinary nature of biotech have forced the decentralization of expertise and the diffusion, rather than concentration, of resources. The resource allocation process has also become increasingly flattened, particularly as the private sector has taken on a larger role in science-based industries such as commercial biotech. Even in terms of regulatory policy, the state apparatus has experienced the challenges of balancing various contending interests, priorities, and bases of expertise among actors. Biotechnology has proven too complex and too difficult to coordinate from above. The state no longer enjoys the sort of structural top-down authority it did during the postwar period. It no longer has the corporate coherence and structural capacity to effectively coordinate the allocation of resources and stakeholders’ activities, to lead and provide authoritative guidance from above. And the state no longer has the ability to effectively pick industrial technology winners in the life sciences field, a specific mode of industrial policy that was, I contend, the key strategic dimension of the developmental state model. In these respects, then, the retreat of the state is a function of both its internal structural transformation and its more arm’s-length interactions with critical stakeholders in the commercial biotech enterprise.

The erosion of the developmental state is not, however, merely a reflection of this structural transformation and thus its incapacity to coordinate; it is also a consequence of the state’s strategic choices. The developmental state has chosen to be less developmental. Here I am less concerned with the structural dimensions of the state-led industrialization model than with the strategic logic of the developmental state. The literature on the Asian postwar experience tells us that the common logic of the developmental state in places such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore was based on choices explicitly intended to mitigate the risks of industrial and technology upgrading. Choices were purposive and strategic. But as I have argued throughout this book, the prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation have precluded this particular strategy of mitigating risk. Rather, biotech innovation and commercialization is characterized by technological, economic, and temporal primary uncertainties, which, I have asserted, can at best be managed or coped with, but not purposively mitigated.

The state has attempted to off-load these sources of uncertainty. The state still controls extraordinary amounts of resources, to be sure, and decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore do not hesitate to employ such resources to help facilitate the growth of the sector. But it is also clear, as Breznitz notes, that the “state’s role is no longer to make the decisions and compel private companies to follow them, but rather to motivate private companies to make long-term commitments to operate in rapid innovation-based industries and activities.”16 At the core of this logic is the state’s investment in the long-term and uncertain processes of discovering rather than picking winners. The gamble in commercial biotech innovation is thus different than it was in earlier experiences of industrial upgrading. The present gamble is on a process, rather than a particular product, technological application, or firm. Put another way, strategic policy choices have increasingly been based on the tenuous, unpredictable, and uncertain potentialities of biotech innovation, or precisely those processes and prospects of innovation over which the state and its smartest decision makers have little control. The state thus refrains from picking winners. It has dealt with the long-term realities and temporal uncertainty of commercial biotech development by retreating.

The retreat of the developmental state is a function of the state’s political decision to no longer play its postwar leadership role. Having invested billions of dollars in biotech, and with lackluster economic returns so far, the state is under tremendous political pressure to rationalize and justify its efforts to grow the commercial biotech sector. This is even the case in nondemocratic Singapore, where the political legitimacy of the ruling PAP government is heavily vested in the city-state’s economic performance. Politically, refraining from picking winners thus prevents having picked colossal (and expensive) losers. And given biotech’s technological, economic, and regulatory uncertainties, the prospects of picking winners are so distant and frankly unpredictable that any attempts by the state to lead the way are likely to be politically costly. The retreat of the state, therefore, is intended to mitigate its political risks. The retreating state has strategically hedged its bets.

The metaphor of betting is particularly apt for capturing the political economy of science-based industrialization. The initial decision in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to enter the commercial biotech sector was essentially an economic bet. For a host of reasons and rationalizations, life sciences industry was seen as economically viable. The political dimensions of this bet were subsumed under this more narrowly conceived though reasonable economic logic. Political capital for local elites, credibility, and international prestige were bonuses, provided these economies did well in the sector. In other words, betting on commercial biotech made political sense largely because it made economic sense.

As I have intimated in this concluding chapter, these bets might still pay off in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Decision makers have adapted their strategic choices in significant ways. They have made decisions that make sense given what decision makers know, what they inherited in terms of political economic structures, and what they view as their primary objectives in the commercial biotech sector. Therefore, one should not be surprised, for example, if Taiwanese firms eventually carve out commercially viable niches in the life sciences sector, especially in the area of medical devices and clinical R&D, just as one could reasonably expect Korea’s chaebols to move more forcefully into the business of new drug development and manufacturing. But these advancements can come only over time, and arguably over the very long term. Temporal uncertainty, as I have suggested here, will continue to mitigate both the prospects and processes of biotech innovation in all three places for the foreseeable future.

The big question decision makers are currently deliberating in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore is whether these economies should continue to bet on the prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation or should simply “fold” and move on. Should they start looking for an exit strategy or continue to invest in a sector that so far has delivered less than expected in terms of economic returns? And moreover, how might they rationalize and manage these decisions? These are, in my mind, inherently political questions, which I elaborated on in Chapters 4 and 5. But whereas the decision to enter the life sciences innovation race was rationalized initially as an economic bet, the choice to continue the gamble or fold is a political bet, and must therefore be rationalized and managed in distinctly political terms.

One scenario, for instance, might see decision makers and stakeholders in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore fold and essentially drop the commercial biotech sector altogether. These economies would simply absorb investment losses, rationalizing and understanding the prospects of biotech innovation as having been loss-leader investments all along. They would be satisfied with some productivity in the sector, even if returns are the result of lower value-added bio-industrial activities. They would merely plod along in the sector, with the hopes that initial investments and institutional developments might spark some innovative outputs. Stakeholders would nonetheless claw back their investments in biotech. They would invest nothing new. They would therefore also forgo whatever political capital they might have gained by taking credit for success in the sector. From what I have learned from informants in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, however, this is the least likely scenario. It would be politically tantamount to admitting a colossal industrial policy failure and thus would foment even greater uncertainty about their economic futures. Such a move would be politically disastrous in large part because of already disproportionately huge sunk investments, both economic and political, in the sector .

Still, if decision makers did choose to exit the sector in this way, it would be more likely to happen in democratic Korea and Taiwan, where electoral turnover can provide exit opportunities for incoming administrations to avoid political blame. Democratic institutions can diffuse the political costs of failure by shifting blame to previous governments. But in Singapore, where the dominant ruling party’s legitimacy is rooted in the city-state’s economic performance, the absence of such electoral possibilities would concentrate political blame on the incumbent regime, thus making this option to fold much less likely to occur. Either way—to exit or not—the decision would be based on a political calculation.

Another plausible though still unlikely scenario is one in which stakeholders and decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore would refine their technonationalist aspirations to accommodate the more technoglobalist realities of life sciences innovation and the commercial biotech industry. Knowledge generation, diffusion, and integration in cutting-edge biotech are increasingly transnational enterprises. As I have demonstrated in this book, it is precisely the spatial, along with technical and economic, open-endedness of these processes that has eluded the postwar developmental state’s economic logic. Yet, as I have also described, a technonationalist impulse continues to shape how decision makers, especially those inside the state, understand the prospects and processes of commercial biotech innovation and in particular the political consequences of their decisions.17 The projected payoff in commercial biotech innovation for the state and its bio-industrial allies is expected to be both economic and political. To accommodate a more technoglobalist posture would thus involve important political considerations, a calculation of political gains and losses for the heavily invested state and biotech industry stakeholders.

To be sure, notwithstanding the rhetorical appeal of technoglobalist notions such as technological “gateways,” “springboards,” and “hubs,” the fact of the matter is that bio-industry stakeholders and state-level decision makers in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore remain terribly unclear as to what they mean by these concepts, precisely because of the uncertain political costs associated with them. Cross-strait tensions, for instance, continue to obfuscate political discussions inside Taiwan about how it ought to manage its economic and technological interactions with China, and more specifically about how Taiwan can be a technological springboard without sacrificing its political and economic autonomy to the mainland. It would be politically inconceivable in Korea to suggest that its national industrial champions, the chaebols, follow others rather than lead in the area of new drug development. And while Singapore is probably the most comfortable among the three with the idea of being a hub for global firms and capital, even there state-level decision makers express considerable concern about being the manufacturing center for global biomedical firms, especially given how much of the state’s performance legitimacy is predicated on Singapore’s aspirations to move up the technological value chain. A strategic shift from more technonationalist to more technoglobalist expectations of commercial biotech is plausible (and even desirable), though still unlikely due to the political costs associated with such a change.

The most plausible scenario, in my mind, would see Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore continue to bet on the long-term processes and uncertain prospects of commercial biotech innovation. They have already invested far too much to simply fold, and while decision makers there may or may not recast their technonationalist aspirations to fit with the sector’s technoglobalist imperatives, it is most likely that these three economies will continue to be emergent players in the sector. However, it is also likely that they will bury the hype surrounding the biotech sector by forcing it into the background. There will be less attention paid to the inconsistent ebb and flow of the sector’s performance. Successes will be downplayed and failures softened in anticipation of unrealistic expectations. As I argued in Chapter 4, the state will have to continue to recalibrate general expectations about the speed and scope of success in the sector. In fact, all this is already happening in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Hopes are still pinned on biotechnology to be a significant contributor to these economies as they move forward, but the sector is no longer thought to be the future foundational pillar of the new knowledge economy. While life sciences R&D remains very much a priority in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, it is also no longer the central priority. At best, the prospects of commercial biotech have come to share the economic stage with other high-technology sectors; at worst, biotech has been relegated to the sidelines, at least in terms of visibility and, most important, the scrutiny surrounding progress in the sector. The state and industrial stakeholders have attempted to moderate the stakes in betting on biotech—to retreat—if only to continue, for the time being, their gamble on the sector. Indeed, 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—though ironically, it appears to have dimmed precisely to save it from being extinguished entirely, at least for now.

The retreat of the developmental state, which I have examined in this book, is significant not only for the study of contemporary political economy in Asia, but also for broader comparative analyses of dynamic political economic transformations at the dawning of the commercial biotech revolution and science-based industrialization more generally. Much of the analysis of the postwar developmental state has focused on the distinctiveness of the Asian experience. Most obvious is the fact that the Asian miracle economies, particularly when compared with other late developers, were extremely successful in achieving rapid economic growth and continual industrial transformation. These are not one-shot economic dynamos, but economies that seemed capable of continually adapting to new political economic challenges. The “Asian” economic miracle was thus explained in regional terms, as though it was a regionally bounded phenomenon.

Some argue that deeply entrenched cultural norms that center on family and hierarchy supported the highly interventionist state in Asia. Others have posited that authoritarian political institutions afforded the state both the autonomy and the capacity to implement effective strategic policies. It has also been pointed out that unlike their Latin American comparators, the Asian economies made a decisive turn to export-oriented industrialization during the 1960s and 1970s, which allowed global market forces to pull the processes of industrial upgrading and the development of international competitiveness, instead of relying on inward policies geared to promote secondary import substitution industrialization. Scholars of international relations have furthermore suggested that the economic rise of Asia rested not only on plugging into global markets but also on regionally hierarchical interdependencies and Japanese leadership, reflecting a “flying geese” pattern of regional industrial upgrading. Actual differences among Asian economies were glossed over to propagate an extraordinary and distinctly regional pattern of economic modernization. In so many ways, the Asian developmental state was constructed to be the antithesis of normal.

That was then, but what about now? The evidence from contemporary Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore suggests that perhaps these increasingly knowledge-intensive political economies are trending toward becoming more “normal” economies. By “normal,” I do not mean to say that these Asian cases are converging on some global business model for science-based industrialization and commercial biotech innovation specifically. Indeed, comparative research shows that there remains a variety of capitalisms, that production regimes vary widely, that national economies plug into transnational networks differently, that national distinctiveness remains critical, and that innovation systems are institutionally adapted to local circumstances. Normal is variation. Therefore, by “trending to the normal,” I instead mean that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are beginning to lose some of their Asian or regionally bounded distinctiveness. Despite once being the paragons of a uniquely Asian variant of postwar capitalism, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are evolving in ways that allow them to join a broader universe of comparable political economies; their categorical distinctiveness, derived from a specific regional experience, is being blurred somewhat; and the developmental state is becoming obsolete.

The fact of state intervention into the economy itself and the mobilization of public resources for the purposes of industrial upgrading cannot alone sustain an Asian distinctiveness. All governments routinely intervene in the economy with the allocation of resources to offset the inherent market failures of technological innovation, even among the “freest” of neoliberal political economies.18 Ever since the publication of Science: The Endless Frontier in 1945, state involvement in science and technology development has been the norm.19 The U.S. government funds upward of US$30 billion per year for upstream basic research in the life sciences, by far and away the largest government outlay in the world for biotech-related R&D; this despite the fact that the United States is conventionally considered a lean liberal market economy. All governments, regardless of size and political economic orientation, inject hundreds of millions of dollars into biotech R&D. On this measure, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are not at all distinctive. Therefore, if the uniqueness of the postwar developmental state was its willingness to allocate resources to address market-failing endeavors and to offset the risks of innovation for private sector entrepreneurs, then it is quite clear that most, if not all, states are “developmental.” The distinction, if formulated in this way, is pedestrian .

The more meaningful distinction between the experiences of the postwar Asian developmental state and more conventional models of political economic organization was the developmental state’s strategies of deliberately picking and making winners, and industry’s willingness to abide by such state directives. The evidence from Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore suggests, however, that biotech development stakeholders have retreated from choosing winners to make. The state has continued to support the development of biotech and bio-industry in significant ways, though its facilitative support increasingly centers on the uncertain and unpredictable processes of discovery as opposed to actively targeting winners. Stakeholders have rationalized this significant transformation in terms of strategy and capacity, a reflection of the state’s unwillingness and inability to confidently pick winners. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, in their efforts to adapt to the uncertainties of science-based industrialization, have thus shifted their approaches to be closer in line with their global competitors. By refraining from picking and making winners, they increasingly appear more normal.

The fact that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have thus far enjoyed very little commercial success in biotechnology also suggests that their experiences are not unlike those of most of the advanced industrial world. This may seem a rather trivial point, but it is important to reemphasize that one of the hallmarks of the postwar developmental state was its unquestionably rapid industrial success in strategically chosen sectors. They were extraordinarily fast followers. It was only less than a decade before Korean firms gained significant global market share in the integrated circuit industry, a pattern similar to Taiwan’s quick entry into the semiconductor manufacturing industry and Singapore’s rapid growth in the computer sector during the 1980s. They were, after all, economies that had gained the moniker “miracles.” However, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have invested billions of dollars in biotech development since the 1990s with little or no commercial blockbuster success, much like the rest of the advanced industrial world. They are all in the biotech race, but it is not at all clear that they are poised to win, or even seriously contend, for that matter. Like other industrial countries, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are struggling to translate upstream research into commercial biotech products and services. They experienced along with the rest of the advanced industrial world a major setback during the early 2000s when risk capital suddenly became more cautious after the dot-com bust. They are struggling to manage expectations about the biotech revolution and to sustain a long-term appetite for the temporal uncertainties of the sector. Simply put, the extraordinary uncertainties of biotech innovation and commercialization are proving to be normal in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, as inescapable for these Asian economies as for other national economies.

It also seems that industrial Asia’s distinctiveness in what were once broadly similar patterns of industrial upgrading during the postwar period has given way to significantly divergent choices with respect to managing technological and economic uncertainty. This book has shown how Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are addressing the challenges of commercial biotech development in many different ways, shaped by path-dependent forces as well as prevailing beliefs about how each economy can best cope with biotech’s uncertainties. Quite simply, they increasingly look different from one another. In fact, the specific cases of Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore and their efforts to adapt to meet the challenges of biotech innovation bear closer resemblance to other non-Asian experiences than to one another. The Korean strategy to grow its lab-to-market biopharmaceutical industry appears more similar to the German and Japanese experiences, drawing on big government spending and leveraging the brand recognition of existing (drug) firms. Singapore’s efforts to grow its biomedical industries by positioning the tiny city-state as a global R&D hub make it look a lot like Iceland and the small Nordic countries. Taiwan’s SME approach to commercializing biotech is similar to that of Canada and parts of Europe. The experiences of Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore in biotech innovation are increasingly less distinctly Asian.

It is clear that the biotech revolution and the global race to translate and commercialize the technology will continue in fits and starts, driven more by a process of learning by doing than a reliance on some sort of master plan. The reality is that a global model for biotech innovation has yet to emerge. The relatively poor performance of the sector worldwide has prohibited a consensus on a winning formulation or industry model. The sector is being continually transformed, and all national political economies—including Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have experienced and will continue to experience this messy transformative moment. They have experimented with new modes of industrial organization and biotech business models, as well as new strategies in financing, commercialization, R&D, and the allocation of resources. And they have all periodically stumbled in their efforts to achieve some success in life sciences innovation—and more important, they will continue to experiment and stumble. The processes of adapting to the uncertainties of science-based industrialization and specifically biotechnology have been felt similarly across all national political economies. The experiences of Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore as they try to manage uncertainty in the postdevelopmental state era are normal; they are not at all distinctive.

2 . “The Export Trap,” Economist, March 25, 2009.

3 . Shahid Yusuf, Innovative East Asia: The Future of Growth (New York: Oxford University Press; Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003).

4 . Richard Doner, Allen Hicken, and Bryan Ritchie, “Political Challenges of Innovation in the Developing World,” Review of Research Policy 26 (2009), 152.

5 . Philip Cerny, “Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action,” International Organization 49 (1995).

6 . Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 164.

7 . Dan Breznitz, Innovation and the State: Political Choice and Strategies for Growth in Israel, Taiwan and Ireland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 207.

8 . Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

9 . Frank Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).

10 . See Dan Breznitz, “National Institutions and the Globalized Political Economy of Technological Change: An Introduction,” Review of Research Policy 26 (2009).

11 . Steven Casper, Creating Silicon Valley in Europe: Public Policy towards New Technology Industries (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12 . Ernst and Young, Beyond Borders: Global Biotechnology Report, 2008 (Cleveland: Ernst and Young, 2008).

13 . See David Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 42–45.

14 . Meredith Woo-Cumings, “The State, Democracy and the Reform of the Corporate Sector in Korea,” in The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis, ed. T. J. Pempel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 117.

15 . T. J. Pempel, ed., The Politics of the Asian Economic Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

16 . Breznitz, Innovation and the State, 29.

17 . Data on health biotechnology publications between 1991 and 2002 show that the rate of international collaboration among Korean researchers (i.e., coauthors from countries other than Korea) actually decreased, reflecting a general unwillingness to engage in more technoglobalist interaction. Moreover, to the extent that Korean researchers did collaborate with foreign colleagues, most of this effort (over 85%) was concentrated in the United States and Japan. Halla Thorsteinsdottir, Abdallah Daar, and Peter Singer, “Health Biotechnology Publishing Takes-off in Developing Countries,” International Journal of Biotechnology 8 (2006), 34–35.