Biotechnology Megacentres: Montreal and Toronto Regional Systems of Innovation

Canada hosts two major diversified biotechnology regional systems of innovation in its two largest cities. Similar in many respects, they display some particular characteristics. We review here the main theories on regional innovation systems and innovative clusters and proceed to analyse these two regional systems before concluding on the usefulness of several theories to study biotechnology regional innovation systems. 1. Theory: From Clusters to Regional Innovation Systems The well-documented agglomeration of high-technology companies in a few geographical regions of each industrialized nation has received several competing explanations. Many authors, based on Alfred Marshall (1890) pioneering work in the late nineteenth century, argued that high-tech firms agglomerate around major pools of skilled labour; sometimes, these pools were initiated by the arrival of large foreign- or locally-owned multinational corporations in the region, such as Galway in Ireland, or Ottawa in Canada (OECD, 2001; Niosi, 2000). In other cases, regional higher education institutions were responsible for the development of such a labour pool. Another European tradition, based on the work of François Perroux (1982), underlined that many regional poles were created by the development of ‘engine industries ’ such as large