Many of you have heard about Colombian coffee and Juan Valdez, but Colombian entrepreneurship? That is a different story. However,  the Colombian government has created and articulated several agencies and institutes to promote innovation, and has started multiple entrepreneurship initiatives in the last couple of years. There is actually a state program named “Locomotive of Innovation,” and it has named biotechnology as one of its main components.

We have interviewed some of the main agencies and institutions to understand how biotechnology will be addresed. The Colombian Department of Science and Technology (Colciencias), the national agency of innovation (Innpulsa), the Ministry of Technology, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Commerce – plus local agencies – are all pushing innovation and entrepreneurship. In 2013, more than 3 million dollars of public funding was directly given to scientists, entrepreneurs and innovators from the different agencies and institutions, and $1.8 million of that went to biotechnology.

In the case of Bogota, which is a national scientific and academic cluster, and is a sizable market, Connect Bogota and Invest in Bogota both play a major role in local biotech innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives.

Connect Bogota links academia, research centers and companies to jointly develop and commercialize research and technology. Several companies and more than 20 universities of the city-region have joined Connect Bogota to create a cluster of information, knowledge, technology and opportunities. Diana Gaviria, director of Connect Bogota, says the most important goal is creating a network to accelerate innovation in the Bogota region and to improve trust among the different parties involved in tech transfer and innovation.

Invest in Bogota is dedicated to promoting the city, and identifying commercial and industrial opportunities. Invest in Bogota is a major player in the constitution of industrial partnerships, organizing supplier chains and optimizing resources for production and development of new technologies in the region. These strategies are the result of focus groups on innovation of specific markets and products, including groups made up of biotech and environment-conscious players.

A list of institutions and ministries help distribute the funding to the proper economical segments. However, this has limited effectiveness. The participation of so many agencies makes it difficult for an entrepreneur to effectively access funding, since each agency manages a small budget. Thus, in order to be effective, one has to draw funding from a host of agencies. Basically, the atomization of  public funding lowers the possible impact of public policy on innovation and entrepreneurship in Colombia. Fortunately, this weakness has been identified and there are proposed alternatives and solutions.

Thus, the fertile ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in Colombia should trickle down to biotechnology, as it is a national priority and the country aims to support its high biodiversity. It’s expected that innovation in biotechnology will happen over the next decades, so do not be surprised if you see more companies moving research areas there in the near future. Just be sure to be on the locomotive of innovation before it leaves the platform.

Johann F. Osma

Monica Segura

How did employment in Greece affect the economic collapse?

Continuing our analysis of Greece’s economic collapse and its biopharma sector (our first post can be seen here), we’re going to look at Greek employment figures. Between 2005-2011, the number of researchers employed in the overall public sector grew markedly:  up 40.7% in government institutes and 12.7% in universities over the period.

Consider that over the same period the number of people employed in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of any kind fell by 29% and R&D investment by these SMEs increased by 26.5% (though in Greece, ‘R&D’ can include all sorts of business development expenses).

Taken together, these figures suggest the private sector adapted early to the crisis, choosing to focus in on a few promising research programmes but cutting wider, less-necessary staff. This was in contrast to the public sector, where policies make it nearly impossible to lay off workers. This is part of a broad public sector inertia, which also includes a lack of political will to implement market-driven competitiveness measures. In hindsight, the government should have followed the example set by the private sector and made targeted cuts, which, while initially reducing the workforce and hurting Greek families, could have reduced a financial burden on the national economy and perhaps staved off the complete collapse. After all, if restructuring and targeted cuts are occasionally necessary for a private company to remain competitive, structural reforms at the state level in Greece could help the country compete and regain entry into international markets. Instead in 2010, there were across-the-board austerity measures.