Does a clustered location matter for constructing regional advantage? The case of biotechnology in Southern Italy

This paper examines distributed knowledge networks in the biotechnology industry located in Campania region in Southern Italy. This region is one of the European less-favoured (ex objective 1) regions. It is characterized by the presence of a few research centres of excellence oriented towards international research partnerships rather than links with the local industrial base. This context underlies the empirical research question of the paper: 1. On which kind of links are the knowledge networks involving the localized few research centres of excellence based? 2. How involved is the rest of the biotech community in its entirety in these kind of links? Our results contribute to an early description of the regional biotech community in terms of relational capabilities. The emerging network configurations will contribute to understand the effective regional knowledge base advantages. This kind of view of the regional innovation system is the most consistent with the CRA framework.