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This paper explores Italy’s biotech industry. This is the case of a new industry formation in a hostile institutional context. Our goal is two-fold. First, it is to extend our understanding of the role of institutions on firm formation and industry creation. Second, it is to offer prescriptive evidence for those regions that are trying to encourage entrepreneurship in innovative industries or increment existing systems of innovations. We adopt the interpretative lenses of the institutional theory. Our work aims to discuss the role that institutions (by the meaning of regulations, policies, and fiscal measures) provide to the development and change of industries around the world. We offer a comparison between Italy and other European countries in order to advise rules and suggestions to improve the competitiveness of the Italian biotech industry and firm formation. We recognize that the Italian institutional context is hostile to new industry creation because the rules and regulations do not support new firm formation. Moreover, Italy represents a context that shows a high level of risk aversion to radical innovation such as biotechnology.   

Science-based firms (SBFs) are venture or corporation based on the development and commercialization of scientific discoveries that are exposed to the unique challenge to handle together business and science. Despite extensive efforts in the attempt to identify those factors that lead to the success of an SBFs the adoption of different definitions and names resulted in a lack of comprehensive picture on the determinants of SBFs' performances. With the objective to review the extant literature on SBFs’ performances and to understand what are the most appropriate parameters to evaluate an SBF, a systematic literature review adopting a comprehensive definition of SBFs was performed. The review, adopting an integrative approach, identified 30 papers published in top journals whose research questions deal with the determinants of SBFs' performances. Findings showed that determinants widely used such as net income within profitability measures, do not fully reflect SBFs performances and innovation abilities should be further investigated. Moreover, preconceived factors such as location and size have low or no impact on SBFs which opens the debate for more investigation. Also, the review identifies a comprehensive and multi-level set of determinants which allows delineating a number of research questions to be addressed in future research.