Stimulating life sciences innovation is an important policy issue for governments in emerging markets (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 13, 646–647; 2014; Nature Biotech. 31, 195–201; 2013). This article analyses biomedical clusters in China to understand the evolution of these ecosystems and to propose a framework that could help guide government policy decisions in other emerging markets. China is the only emerging market that has attempted to build multiple bioclusters, and so could potentially provide the most robust data for such an analysis.

Applying this framework to other emerging markets could help guide local government policies and investment decisions (Fig. 1b), depending on which of the four broad categories — 'innovation leaders', 'untapped talent', 'niche hubs' or 'aspiring' — the bioclusters seem to most closely resemble.

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