Considering the EZ measures, put forward in our last post, it becomes quite clear that the government mainly focuses on startups and SMEs when dealing with biotech failures. Although we certainly agree with these measures, the current Dutch biotech innovation system gives SMEs a hard time, we find it strange that measures supporting large, existing companies are to a large extent missing. We observe that these companies are moving their R&D abroad, the so-called braindrain, because Dutch conditions are simply too unfavorable. This observation is endorsed by biotech branche organizations (see our earlier post on branche critics).
The government does too little to prevent this. Large companies also suffer from overregulation. There are little investments in educating high quality researchers while these are very much needed for large companies. More over, stimulating entrepreneurship among researchers might even lessen the availability of skilled personell for these comapnies. Also, as their business is much closer to the market, large firms suffer the most from the low acceptance of biotech products.
We argue that there is an important failure in the current view of the government on the biotech sector. Large companies should get more attention! Therefore we come up with the following, more specified research question:

What policy measures should the government take to prevent large companies from leaving the Netherlands?