A few days ahead of the SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco on November 15, 2013, SynBio Consulting takes a look at the importance of developing trade associations dedicated to the growing synthetic biology industries.
The San Francisco Bay, Boston, and London areas are currently widely recognized as hot spots for Synthetic Biology. According to our data, they gather about 37% of all businesses in the field. This clustering of Synthetic Biology innovation capacity is not only historical but has also been politically encouraged as recently demonstrated in the UK.
Much of the advocacy of business cluster promotion assumes that they provide unique opportunities for business to engage in collaboration. Michael Porter even suggests that they create near perfect conditions for business growth:
“A concentration of visible rivals encourages the search for ways of competing that are not head on. Niche opportunities overlooked by others can reveal themselves. Ready access to suppliers and partners provides flexibility to configure the value chain in a variety of ways.”
While business clusters seem to provide unique collaborative opportunities for businesses, they have also been largely criticized with studies showing no necessary impacts on business performances, or that they encourage startup creation but not survival (Stuart and Sorenson, 2003).
While many governments have been seeking to promote participation in business clusters, they seem to be largely ignoring the contribution that could be made by specific synthetic biology trade associations.
The need for Synthetic Biology trade associations
An industry association can be distinguished as an inter-firm networks coordinated by a third party established independently of any one company and with powers to aid, guide and cajole participating businesses (Sayer and Walker 1992).
Historically, industry associations have been:
- Improving the human resource base, for example by identifying skill needs and coordinating training provision. iGEM, Synberc and a few others have been taking up this role for synthetic biology until now.
- Improving the industry knowledge base, for example by the dissemination of information on market trends, opportunities and technology. Unfortunately there is very little available information specifically on synthetic biology. Synbio consulting is collecting and analyzing this information, some of which is and will be published on our insight page.
- Setting and enforcing industry standards, to help ensure that industry development is not impaired by sales of substandard output and to maximize technology and product compatibility. This role has been actively taken by iGEM at the student and research level. Moving forward, this discussion also needs to happen in the industry.
- Communicating and negotiating with government bodies. Until now this role has been taken by bodies such as the Wilson Center, the Observatory for Synthetic Biology or consultants (for example one of our current clients is the European Commission).
Things are starting to move. While Linkedin groups such as the Synthetic Biology entrepreneurial community have been taking up part of this role, the UK BioIndustry Association recently launched a synthetic biology group. At Synbio Consulting we believe we’ve reached a critical mass in terms of sheer number of industries in our field and hope to start a discussion:
It is high time for Synthetic Biology trade associations.
