Innovation in Biotechnology Firms in Germany


This project investigates the relation between R&D collaboration, knowledge transfer, innovation, and firm performance in German biotechnology clusters. Below we compare the main activities characterizing the biotech firms with and without cluster membership.

Key research questions


  1. Are firms in biotechnology clusters more innovative and successful? Existing studies showed that areas densely populated by firms from the same industry are more innovative. Looking at the firm level, can we observe the same pattern?

  2. How do resources provided by regional cluster organisations (for instance, networking events) affect firm’s innovation and success? Are clusters financial or financial means more important to support biotech firms?


Does cluster membership foster knowledge diffusion, collaboration, and innovation?

We conducted a survey among German biotech firms in order to assess to what extent cluster membership influence the R&D spending, collaborations, and innovation. The results and more information about the project are available on the ZEW project webpage

Mapping the main activities of biotech firms

Firms were matched to the different waves of website contents data collected in 2018 and 2019 to fit with the surveyed period. The majority of our Biotech surveyed firms were scrolled over this period and we looked at the type of words combination occuring between the two corpus of text (website contents from firms with vs without membership).

The interactive graphs below present the results for the main 5 areas characterizing the text corpus extracted from the website contents. PCA stands for principal component analysis delineating a specific area (or topic) composed of different words combinations (see the right handside for the corresponding word combinations and frequency). The relative distance between the PCA represents their semantic proximity measured by the overlap of words.


Biotech firms' website contents (topic modelling with LDA)

Firms with cluster membership

Firms without cluster membersip