Key National Factors in the Emergence of Computational Chemistry Firms

The results show that the emergence of firms based on new science depends heavily on the strength of universities and public research institutes in the underlying sciences, particularly for the leading country — the United States.

Abstract

Using information compiled from the Internet, we find that the number of computational chemistry firms in each of the 10 OECD countries (The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia) is: (i) strongly correlated with the country's strength in computational chemistry science and with the extent of the national scientific networks; (ii) is weakly correlated with the size of the domestic markets; and (iii) not correlated with the extent of the infrastructure as measured by the number of supercomputers installed. These results show that the emergence of firms based on new science depends heavily on the strength of universities and public research institutes in the underlying sciences. This is particularly true for the leading country — the United States.