January 24, 2012

Event details: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/11469/

In Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia’s Developmental State, Joseph Wong examines the emerging biotechnology sector in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. These economies have invested billions of dollars in biotech industries since the 1990s, but commercial blockbusters and commensurate profits have not followed. On one level, then, Betting on Biotech is a story about the challenges of growing a particularly high-profile industry sector. On another level, the book is about how Asian states, firms, universities and the general public more generally are making very high-stakes bets on things about which they know very little. The profound uncertainties of life-science-based industries such as biotech have forced these Asian economic dynamos to confront a new logic of industry development, one in which past strategies of picking and making winners have given way to a new strategy of throwing resources at what remain very long shots. Betting on Biotech illuminates a new political economy of industrial technology innovation in places where one would reasonably expect tremendous potential; yet where billion-dollar bets in biotech continue to teeter on the brink of spectacular failure. By encouraging us to think beyond the developmental state, Wong’s account of Asia’s economic future and the debates which animate it are not so different from what we are seeing elsewhere, including here in Canada.

Joseph Wong is a Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science. He is also the Director of the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs.