Shaping technologies and shaping markets: Creating demand for biotechnology

Technological innovation is the ‘commercialization’ of new products and processes by firms. When based on new technologies, product innovation by firms involves the creation of new demand as well as the creative technical development of the product itself. This article discuss innovation in this light, bringing together literature on the social shaping of technologies and on the economics of innovation. As an example of the simulataneous shaping of products and new institutions to form a new ‘market space’, the article explores the development and marketing of one kind of biotechnology in the 1980s, specifically the exploitation of monoclonal antobody technology for the manufacture of new health care diagnostics.