Toward a Sustainable Technopolis - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 175

Table 4 Bangalore timeline

1911 India's British rulers invited Nobel-laureate chemist William Ramsay to help

select a site for a science school. Ramsay chose Bangalore

1950s and
1960s

Independent India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up state-owned
engineering companies near Bangalore to fulfill his vision of rapid
industrialization. He selected Bangalore because of the talent available at the
Indian Institute of Science, the school set up by Ramsay. Non-state companies
like Motor Industries Co., a subsidiary of Germany's Robert Bosch Gmbh,
moved to Bangalore to supply parts
1977 A socialist Indian government asked International Business Machines Corp. to
leave the country after it refused to dilute its stake to 40 %. IBM's departure
became an opportunity for entrepreneurs like Azim Premji, who was then
running a Bangalore-based vegetable-oil business started by his father. Premji
hired engineers and built his first minicomputer
1981 N.R. Narayana Murthy, an engineer who wanted to become a communist
politician, changed his mind and set up Infosys Technologies Ltd. with $250
in Pune in western India. He moved the company to his hometown Bangalore
in 1983 after Motor Industries gave him his first order
1996 Global companies panicked that the year 2000 date change would crash
computers. Premji's Wipro Ltd. and Murthy's Infosys rewrote millions of
lines of code for customers worldwide. Bangalore's software industry, which
employed only 947 people in 1991, expanded rapidly
2005 Companies like IBM and Accenture Ltd. are hiring in Bangalore to cut costs.
Meanwhile, Bangalore's homegrown software makers are competing for
consulting contracts outside India that were once the domain of US and
European technology companies
Source Mukherjee ( 2005 ), used with permission

The environment includes high quality of life at affordable cost, and business
services including 24 h automated customs for tenant companies' exports.
Tax incentives/exemptions, government investment, low-interest loans, and
''R&D encouragement grants'' round out the picture of incentives. However, the
success of HSBIP has led the Taiwan government to plan to discontinue tax
incentives for high-tech, and transfer them to solar and green industries.
Tsinghua University (science) and Chiao-Tung National University (engineer-
ing) are located on the periphery of the park, enhancing industry-university
cooperation. ITRI (the Industrial Technology Research Institute) also has two
campuses adjoining the HSBIP, and runs incubators for new firms there.

6 Synthesis for the Future

Table 5 brings together the major themes of this chapter.
Table 6 summarizes additional views of a sustainable technopolis based on
today's state of the art. It is a completely new way of doing business. New
technopoleis cannot hope for sustainability if they follow the practices of the
Table's left-hand column.