Scientific Innovation and Non-Western Regional Economies: Cuban Biotechnology's ‘Experimental Milieu’

Abstract

A good deal of research within the cultural turn in economic geography has sought to understand the relationship between economic activity and regional culture. This work encompasses an increasingly heterodox set of approaches to regional economic activity, from innovation studies to processes of embedding to accounts of regional learning and clustering, and an increasingly broad set of empirical cases through which these issues are regularly discussed. Only recently has the literature had much to say about the relationship between scientific knowledge and regional culture, however, or about the empirical experience of non-Western regional economic activity and forms of innovation within this. This paper seeks to further develop these two recent strands by bringing them together. Firstly it transposes the study of high-technology regional cultures to a developing world and socialist country context. I examine, as a case study, Cuba's Science Pole, a biomedical growth pole on the outskirts of Havana comprising some forty-two interlinked institutions and 14 000 scientists. I show how a space for biotechnology was created and maintained outside of the capitalist milieu with which the industry has come to be associated in the West. More specifically, I reveal how the formal demands made by the Cuban state of this biotechnology endeavour paradoxically encouraged the development of a suite of informal and innovative scientific practices. To account for how this very different approach nevertheless resulted in a similar ‘regional culture’ of innovation to that found in high-technology regions in the West, I suggest we need to consider not just the structural components of regional cultures (labour mobility, attitudes to risk, etc) but also the forms of rationality that underpin such factors themselves. In order to do this I turn to some of the insights of the science-studies literature as to the epistemological foundations of processes of innovation and knowledge production, to argue that regional cultures of innovation are never just economic spaces, they are also epistemic spaces.