About InDeCS-H

There is a historical lack of comparative data about life sciences companies in Europe. Recent data gathering initiatives have focused on more developed biotech sectors with little focus on life science companies in the new Member States. The fact that the industry is spread out across different sectors, regions, and disciplines also makes obtaining an overview of the sector difficult.

This project will contribute to building a data collection system for the biotech sector in new Member States which is comparable country to country and can be benchmarked against existing data from EU Member States. This data will be used to identify gaps and analyze trends for the purpose of creating polices aimed at supporting the biotech sector in these countries.

This data will also be made publicly available with the intent of increasing the visibility of the sector and individual companies amongst institutions, investors and venture funds, and for partnering purposes – Biotech to Biotech and Biotech to Pharma - as well as towards the media, regional, national, and European authorities and international companies and organizations.

Detailed objectives

• to design a self service, data collection and tracking system
• to carry out marketing of the system to the biotech community and data collection
• to validate, analyze findings and propose policy recommendations
• to disseminate the results widely among critical stakeholders and wider European and International communities.

Workpackages

WP1 – Software, marketing, data collection system and data delivery
This work package will be carried out by Venture Valuation with a team of two experts and EuropaBio and Critical I will contribute to the work. The project will involve the extension of an existing tried and tested software system to gather data that companies can complete on line. The WP1 involves the creation of web sites in the target countries independently or in association with partners where appropriate.

WP2 – Validation, analysis and report
Critical I will be the leader for WP 2 with a team (2 experts) with background in data validation and analysis. The collected data will be made available to Critical I for validation, analysis and policy recommendations.

WP3 – Dissemination
EuropaBio will be the leader for WP 3 with a team 1 with background in communications, Critical I will contribute to dissemination.

Dissemination of the project has two main aims:

• 1 – To inform authorities in the Member States concerned and EU policy makers about the state of the sector in these countries, how it compares to other EU countries and what policy measures needed to address strengths and weaknesses of the sector.
  
• 2 – To profile the biotech sector in these countries throughout Europe and internationally and help attract investors and business partners to grow and develop the bioscience sector in these countries. The dissemination plan will therefore also be targeted at the biotech community in the rest of Europe and the US

WP4 – Post Hoc Analysis
The Post Hoc Analysis phase will focus on making the data collection system a sustainable enterprise, with companies continuing to upload data year on year. The system has a proof of concept already in countries where it is already established (e.g. Switzerland).