One of the important aspects of the innovation system is research and education. Education creates new workers with special skills for the biotech sector, and research creates new knowledge to be used in the biotech sector. Only when the Netherlands can succeed in constantly educating skilled workers and create innovative ideas can it be one of the leading countries in biotech.
When looking at the graduates in bio sciences and looking at the scientific publications in the Netherlands, it can be concluded that these are very good. The quality of the graduates is high, the number of publications (per researcher) is high, and these papers are cited very often. There is, however, a problem with the quantity of graduates. Companies need quality researchers, but also need enough of them. In recent years the number of people graduating in bio sciences has dropped almost 50%.
This means companies have, or will have trouble finding new, qualified employees for their R&D activities.
Indeed, when looking at the research that is being done in Europe and the US, it is evident that US companies are spending far more on biotech than European companies. For example, the R&D expenditures of US companies in 2002 and 2003 were twice as high as European companies. However, when looking at the amount spend on R&D per employee in 2003, European companies were spending about 10% more than American companies. In 2002 the amount where almost equal. This seems to suggest that European companies are willing to invest money on R&D, but are not able to because there are not sufficient researchers.
In R&D people are still the most important, above labour cost, and companies will follow the people. The task for the Netherlands is to either increase the number of graduates, or to attract foreign researchers. Something needs to be done to prevent larger companies from moving their R&D activities abroad.