Adapting a foreign direct investment strategy to the knowledge economy: the case of Singapore's emerging biotechnology cluster

The Singapore Government has identified biotechnology as one of the four pillars of the economy for the twenty‐first century. For the last forty years, Singapore has pursued a very successful economic growth strategy of attracting investment from leading multinationals through a combination of financial incentives, world‐class infrastructure, a highly literate workforce and a business‐friendly regulatory environment. In the biotechnology industry worldwide, however, the typical development pattern has been very different: new start‐up companies backed by venture capitalists clustered around leading research universities. This article examines the development of the biotechnology cluster in Singapore, showing how a modified version of Singapore's traditional growth model is co‐existing with a more typical biotechnology development pattern.