What Lures and Retains the International Creative-Class Family?: A Case Study of the Family Unit Found in Vancouver's Biotechnology Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that the notion of successful technology transfer is highly dependent on a region's ability to attract and retain star personnel to locations where global mobility is relatively common. Such regions also must provide professional as well as family-centered opportunities for the spouses of star personnel, if a globally mobile couple is to remain "in place" for an extended amount of time. One such region is the burgeoning world-class biotechnology sector found in Vancouver, British Columbia. Drawing upon the work of Richard Florida and Sir Peter Hall, this article explores the importance of recruiting efforts that move beyond attention on creative individuals to include his/her family. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with executives, senior scientists, and human-resource managers at Vancouver-based biotechnology firms, this study finds that the primary factors that lured and retained international creative-class families (ICCFs) (both expatriate Canadian and foreign families) included, in particular, the availability of spousal work visas and professional employment options, as well as traditional livability attributes such as "family friendly" workplace policies, good public schools, access to affordable public universities, well-kept parks, a general feeling of public safety, and accessibility to outdoor activities. The decision to remain in Vancouver was usually made by the internationally highly skilled, biotechnology professional's spouse, as opposed to a unilateral decision made by the highly skilled (and seemingly highly mobile) biotechnology professional.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".