BIOTECHNOLOGY INNOVATION FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO. A THEORETICAL APPROACH TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BEST PRACTICES IN EDUCATION AND PUBLIC POLICIES

In the global environment, we face several and urgent problems arising from the limited availability of natural resources. World population reaches 7 billion people last 2011. Mexico exceeds 118 million people occupying the 11th. position in the world. If the governments in development countries wants to find a way to decrease poverty and increase the state of well-being using strategies that developed countries implement, there is going o be an enormous increase pressure on the planet's resources. Currently the population is consuming annually the equivalent to 1.4 times the natural resources the planet is capable to generate. If everybody consumed like the average citizen in the United States, it'll would take 5.4 planets to sustain us.

The northwest region of Mexico represents 9.7% of total population in 2010, the 9.5% of GDP in 2009 and the 25.8% of country's mainland. However, 46.4% of the land is very dry and 31.8% is semi dry. This environment represent an area of opportunity to create and innovate government public policies by identifying new opportunities for knowledge based business like biotechnology, which would result in the emergence of a new type of economy known as "Bio-economy" that is a term that has been defined as follows:

"Joint operations added in a society that uses the latent value in products and processes from biotechnology to capture new growth and welfare benefits for citizens and nations "(OCDE, 2006)."

The benefits of the Bio-economy to participate in greater proportion on the GDP are generated through:
• Gains in productivity (agriculture and health).
• Effects of improvement (health and nutrition).
• Substitution effects (environmental, industrial and energy).
• High-value jobs generation.
• Human resource development in emerging disciplines.

Through several projects, the Science State Councils coordinate partnership between government, industry and academia to assess the importance of biotechnology applications. This generates skills and knowledge to institutions, companies and stakeholders in a regional approach. If the society concurred in promoting the integration, collaboration an also requiring for scientific research to support new public policies that it would be implemented by the government, then the original goal for decrease poverty and increase a state of well-being would be accomplished.

Several states governments in northwestern Mexico generate coordinated actions in May 2011 known as "Hermosillo Agreement", which links to these entities as a single regional block that will trigger the development of northwestern Mexico. The goal is to generate activities in several industrial areas that have a vision for the sustainable use of natural resources, mainly by supporting the creation of knowledge based firms and the creation of joint projects between governments, industry and academia.

This need for develop strategies for the northwest region and specifically for Baja California, can be summarized in the following points:
• Human resource development and technology and combine them with the productive sector to develop technological base packages on the issue of biotechnology.
• Develop Baja California's competitive advantages
• Generation of human capital in biotechnology .
• Encourage of innovative public policies for SMEs in biotechnology .
• Consolidate the northwest of Mexico as a biotechnology development region in an international level.