New Zealand feature: NZ lures high-flying Scot to head biotech

Similarities between New Zealand and Scotland are plentiful - the agrarian industries, the scenery, the weather.

But one of the less heralded similarities is the two places' biotechnology industries - or at least, it was, before Scotland's received a major boost about four years ago.

Now, according to Ernst and Young, if Scotland were a US state it would be ranked seventh in the union in terms of numbers of biotech companies.

Just as the NZ government has announced biotechnology as one of three key sectors to be targeted as a growth area, so Scotland decided in 1999 to double the size of its biotech sector in four years.

It's not surprising, then, that the NZ government chose to head-hunt Peter Lennox, then director of biotechnology networks for Scottish Enterprise, one of Scotland's largest development agencies, to be the country's new Biotechnology Sector director.

Interviewed by the New Zealand Herald newspaper in April, Lennox said the country should be "shouting from the mountaintops" about its biotechnology.

He now says Scotland's aim to double the size of its biotech cluster has worked - by 2001 it was growing at around 30 per cent a year - with the result that "we moved science from the research lab into newly-created companies".

Industry NZ chief executive Neil Mackay said it had been important "to find a person of international standing" to fill the director's role.

Lennox, who has a scientific background in the food and drink industry, has also worked as director of Scottish Trade International, a government export agency.

He begins work in New Zealand this month.