Technology policy and the regions - the case of the BioRegio contest

Only recently, it has been argued that technology policy should give more attention to the regions as they could play a key role in the process of technological change. The German Federal Government has tried to do so by initiating a contest in which Germany's leading Biotech regions competed for a given amount of public funding. This paper reports on the aims, the conceptual design and the results of the BioRegio contest (BRC) and tries to place it into a broader theoretical context. It is shown that the new policy instrument cannot solve the fundamental information problem associated with government intervention into the process of technological change, but that it goes into the right direction by taking the regions seriously and giving prominence to the well-functioning interplay of the various elements of regional innovation systems. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.