Does Biotech Reflect a New Science-based Innovation Regime?

The purpose of this paper is to enter into the ""black box'' of science-based sectors, to seek a better understanding of the nature of the dynamics of such technological regimes in their different forms. Special attention is given to the institutional dimensions, which, in the authors' view, play a major role in structuring technological regimes and organizational trajectories. After a short review of the literature on science-based sectors and technological regimes, some specificities of the new emerging biotech sector are focused on, aiming to show how and why it can be regarded as a new type of science-based technological regime, referred to in this paper as the science-based ""type 2'' model. In a short final conclusion, some of the consequences of the existence of this basic distinction between two types of ""science-based'' regime are explored.