Resource interfaces telling other stories about the commercial use of new technology: The embedding of biotech solutions in US, China and Taiwan

This study focuses on the embedding of new biotech solutions into three business landscapes - US, China and Taiwan. A "state-of-the-art" chromatography system tuned for operating in the step between laboratory and large-scale production is used as the common point of departure to investigate the supplier-user interfaces involving biotechnology in each of the three countries; the resource interaction in the networks around each machine is mapped. The analysis identifies the influences left on these resource interfaces by the national frameworks of science, policy and business. The results stress the importance of established resource structures to enable use of new technical solutions, the facilitating and restricting role of local path dependency, and the problems faced by policy in breeding network-level interactions sustaining the development and use of biotech solutions.