台灣中草藥取得美國 FDA植物藥品許可之研究：產業群聚觀點

Abstract

Taiwan has many core competences in the TCM industry. Amongst the more tangible ones include clinical centers and an official committee to regulate TCM established since 1995. The intangible and equally valuable are the R&D talents, laws in favor of proprietary protection of firms, and reputation that’s developed over decades of manufacturing “Taiwan” branded quality products. By banking on these assets, Taiwan may be in a key position to develop a pipeline of botanical drugs to apply to the US FDA. In so forth, this research demonstrates that Taiwan’s TCM industry can benefit from business clusters based on Professor Michael Porter’s argument in The Competitive Advantage of Nations, 1990, where he modeled the effect of the local business environment on competition in terms of four interrelated influences depicted as the Diamond Theory. Through his studies of the California Wine Industry, there are similarities in the vertical supply chain of the industry to that of the TCM industry, both originating from the agricultural sector. Thus it is pertinent to explore and learn from successful cases and how it may be fruitful for Taiwan’s TCM industry. In his literature, a business cluster is a geographical location where enough resources and competences are amassed and an industry has reached a critical threshold, giving it a key position in a given economic branch of activity, with a decisive sustainable competitive advantage over other places, or even world supremacy in that field . He further states that, “The most important sources of prosperity are created not inherited. Productivity does not depend on what industries a region competes in, but on how it competes. The prosperity of a region depends on the productivity of all its industries.” Where, ideally, the ultimate goal is for Taiwan to gain momentum in supplying a pipeline to the US FDA Botanical Drug Path, efficiently and by an industry cluster.