Determinants of biotechnology utilization by the Canadian industry

摘要

The research reported in this paper uses data from Statistics Canada's Biotechnology Firm Survey, 1997 to look into the factors that cause the Canadian industry to use biotechnology. The descriptive results show that the health sector leads the way in biotechnology utilization, followed in decreasing order by the agriculture and food processing sector and the environment sector. Furthermore, biochemistry and immunology based biotechnologies are the most used, with 76% of the 282 firms surveyed firms using them, as compared to 74% for bioprocessing based biotechnologies, and 52.5% for DNA based biotechnologies. Analytical results from multivariate analyses show that biotechnology development is fairly more industry specific than firm specific. In fact, the extent to which a firm's absorptive capacity (AC), its learning capability, and its stock of relational capital affects its utilization of biotechnology depends largely on the industrial sector to which the firms belongs. Firm's characteristics, namely, age and size, are found to have no effect on the utilization of biotechnology.