Earticle

In designing a series of alternative development strategies geared towards the regional competitiveness, due attention should be primarily given to how to interlink relevant technology and knowledge with regional industries. Reflecting upon spatial factors, even though Chungcheong Region's leading industries have recorded higher growth potentials than the national average, it seems so difficult to find specific evidence divulging inter- or intra-regional networking system among relevant organizations, even if it exists. In order to contribute to overcoming these types of limitations, this study analyzed Chungcheong Region‘s bio-pharmaceutical industry network and explored its structural, positional, and spatial characteristics. In specific, it focused on 1,450 national R&D projects under the Ministry of Knowledge Economy in Korea between 2000 and 2009. Concerned with analytical tools, it depended on the social network analysis techniques. The results presented that the Chungcheong Region's bio-pharmaceutical industry had 1,495 connections with a total of 545 organizations. On average, an organization in the network was interconnected with 2.627 organizations. Furthermore, universities within the Chungcheong Region were the most active in the bio-pharmaceutical network, keeping the highest positions in terms of centrality and betweenness values. Though most of the networking forms yielded the Capital Region-skewed types, the study partially confirmed the fact that Chungcheong Region's vernacular bio-pharmaceutical industry network became stronger over the research period.