ABSTRACT
Throughout the past chapters I have tried to give accounts of innovation processes in German biotechnology which provide answers to the following questions: How do these processes unfold through time and space? Through which forms of agency, understood as relational work by individuals embedded in situated social contexts, are relationships created, transformed, ended and replaced? How do these activities advance innovations? My emphasis in this book was to understand the role of investment in these processes. Investment, rather than ‘finance’, was understood as a type of relational work in which funds are allocated to innovation activities in the expectation of returns – financial and otherwise – based on a particular logic of appreciating and assessing the value of innovations. While venture capital (VC) is often treated as the preeminent form of financing in biotechnology, and while in the context of political economy VC is seen as a manifestation of financialization in the field of innovation, I approached investment in a more open framework, accounting for the possibility of multiple orders of worth to be enacted in investment.
