It is possible that there once was a time when scholars used to sit isolated with
their cogitations in their attics, emerging now and then to publish their latest erudite offerings which no one had ever thought of before. If such a time did once exist, it certainly does so no longer. Writing a scientific or scholarly book in our era
is to a large extent a team effort in which your team members are continually
changing and you are unceasingly grateful for the privilege of enjoying and benefiting from the exertions, ideas, comments and support of a large number of very
able people. Scientific and scholarly work nowadays is a process impossible without the existence and use of social capital.
This book is no exception to the above stated. There are very many colleagues
(some of them referees and thus anonymous) and friends who have made the book
possible. The foremost of these is Roger Bolton, with whom I wrote my first paper
on social capital. Most of that paper has found its way into various passages of this
book, while Chapter 6, Social Capital and Entrepreneurship, comes almost completely from Roger's pen. Thank you, Roger, for letting me use your text!
The empirical studies of the biotech industries of Japan, California and Sweden
would have been impossible without a great deal of help. Kiyoshi Kobayashi and
Kakuya Matsushima of Kyoto University and Therese Vallerius and Helena Jonsson-Franchi of the Swedish Office of Science and Technology in Los Angeles organized the distribution and collection of questionnaires as well as arranging study
visits for me in Kansai and California respectively; Lars Norlander attended to the
Swedish questionnaire and compiled the data. Miho Ota helped us to interpret the
Japanese replies. The empirical study of the biotech industries was prepared by
Elin Nilsson, with whom I also coauthored a paper of which some parts are included in this book.