Abstract

"Convergent aspirations: The emergence of a therapeutics ecosystem in Boston"

Maki Umemura, Cardiff University (UmemuraM@cardiff.ac.uk)

This paper explores the history of the life science business since the 1980s, from ground-breaking scientific discoveries, the relative decline of pharmaceutical firms, and the rise of biotech companies engaged in novel therapeutic modalities, such as tissue engineering, cell therapy and gene therapy. The project explores how the evolving innovation ecosystems have shaped this field.

The research builds upon a long and rich body of business history scholarship on medicine, which include industry-level (Galambos and Sturchio 1998, Chandler 2009) and firm-level (Davenport-Hines and Slinn 1992, Hughes 2011, studies, as well as works over a range of medicines (Liebenau 1987, Mann and Plummer 1991) and geographies (Monnais 2019, Yang 2021). Significant advances in medicine over the past century have also generated scholarship that has spanned various technological modalities, from chemistry-based pharmaceuticals (Burhop 2009, Cramer 2015) to biotechnology-based biologics (Marks 2009, Rasmussen 2014). Despite decades of development, however, limited scholarship explores the world of firms engaged with emerging technological modalities, including cells and genes.
The project also draws insight from the literature on innovation ecosystems (Moore 1996, Adner and Kapoor 2010, Gomes et al. 2018), particularly as it relates to their emergence and evolution (Moore 1993, Dedehayir et al 2018). Existing scholarship refers to innovation ecosystems as collaborative endeavours of a constellation of actors; one in which suppliers may provide essential components and technologies, diverse organizations offer complementary products and services, and customers generate demand (Moore 1996). Prior studies have adopted a longitudinal perspective that examines the dynamics and coevolution of actors, institutions and technologies in innovation ecosystems (McKelvey 1999, Beltagui et al. 2019, Kuan and West 2023). Incorporating this lens from the ecosystems literature, this research considers how evolving changes in the community of actors, their interactions and interdependence have shaped the trajectory of the life science business.