The centre undertakes research within a broad range of management, organisational and competitiveness issues, which hold specific relevance for the biotech sector, but also for science-driven sectors in general.

Biotech Business is primarily concerned with biotech activity within the Øresund region, also known as Medicon Valley, which holds one of several agglomerations of biotech companies that have emerged in the US and in Europe since the mid 1980s. Like their counterparts in other regions, Medicon Valley companies have evolved through a complex interaction between science opportunities, venture capital and markets for research and for research-based products. Among other things, Biotech Business research will produce a long overdue systematic mapping and analysis of the Medicon Valley population of companies in terms of these interactions. This mapping will be of interest not only to DBF companies, but also to the VC sector financing them, to science institutions reflecting on new strategic mandates, and to policy institutions.

Biotechnology has become an ambiguous term and needs delimitation. In its modern version, biotechnology refers to a body of techniques and technologies applying genetics, immunology, molecular, cellular structural biology for discovery and development of new products. It is increasingly being applied in different industrial sectors, with pharmaceuticals being by far the largest arena for industry-specific biotechnology.

Traditional sectors such as agriculture and food processing (ingredients) are increasingly building their industry specific knowledge on biotechnology, and it is also becoming the knowledge basis for new industries, including biomaterials and environmental technologies. Of particular importance is the emergence of a new industry of companies undertaking biotech-based R&D without further downstream activities, refered to as Dedicated Biotech Firms (DBFs). They deliver inputs to pharmaceutical R&D, and they develop tools and methodologies for biotech R&D.

We use the term "biotech sector" to denote both its core of DBFs and also other companies' drawing substantially on biotechnology and having at the same time further downstream activities within specific industries (i.e. including pharmaceutical companies and producers of ingredients as inputs to industrial processes such as Novozymes, Danisco, Chr. Hansen etc.). The biotech sector also includes organisations in public research and health-care in cases where their activities primarily involve biotechnology or rely on its underlying knowledge base.

Finally, the term "biotech community" expands the delimitation to include associations such as Medicon Valley, the Øresund Food network and bodies of public administration with a focus on biotech.