Technology, Market and Company Journeys: How Can We Help Them Succeed? - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 196

(Technology Parks) have been develop as one of the types of infrastructure that sit
firmly on the boundary between incubation and private sector activities and in
some countries taking an active role in shifting the balance of the innovation
system from a public R&D driven economy to a private sector based innovation
system that acts in concert with the public investment in R&D.
Factors which have proved to be of value in making such a system work
include:

• Collaborative relationships which are normally developed through an iterative
process that link public and private organisations in complex arrangements
which provide infrastructure and business support programmes.
• Creative business practices between knowledge generators and knowledge users
that drive technology, company and market journeys.
• Experienced people who can appreciate both the value of technology in a
commercial context and have the skill to support the transfer of the technology
from the domain of creation to the domain of its use to realise a competitive
advantage.
• A funding regime that slowly decreases public involvement in R&D and
increases the private sector funding.
• The patience to build the necessary systems over a time horizon of 10-20 years
rather than simple often politically driven short-terms horizons: This time
horizon is particularly important when benchmarking the impact on the econ-
omy of technology parks.

The influence of competition that provides the incentive which gives impetus,
through technology push and market pull, to those people and organisations
involved in the system to innovate and gain a competitive advantage. The incen-
tives for the public sector include stability that comes with creating employment
particularly when this is of high value, tax generation to sustain and grow the
process, and the creation of wealth and prosperity.

3 Performance of Science and Technology Parks

A study of the performance of companies on science parks undertaken by the UK
Science Park Association and the UK Government's then Small Business Service,
in 2003 UKSPA ( 2003 ) noted that science parks that operate in regional envi-
ronments that provide all the elements and connections noted in Fig. 2 are more
successful than those where the linkages are either missing or not functioning.
The message here is that managers on science parks need to understand where
capacity is missing and find ways of filling these gaps.
Knowledge capital includes a wide range of organisations which include uni-
versities, public sector research organisations, and private R&D organisations such
as corporate research laboratories and contract research organisations. Opportu-
nities

exist to develop relationship management programmes to link these