Technology, Market and Company Journeys: How Can We Help Them Succeed? - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 207

Most regulations are promulgated by governments. Today details of the these
regulations can be found on such sites as Netregs for the UK regulations on the
environment and other business support sites such as Business Links.
One of the roles of science parks is to know how to guide companies in
interpreting these regulations.
4.5.1 Pre and Full and Post Incubation (Technology Acceleration)
and Developing Companies
The process of pre, full and post incubation is an area in which science and
technology parks are continuing to evolve and develop new ideas.
Some examples for opportunities for pushing the boundary for science and
technology parks include:
• Professionalising this process.
• Concentrating resources in one location and then operating across a network
using the professional skills to support the process in a number of locations.
There are strategies which can be adopted by science and technology parks in
order to create this concentration of activity. These include pricing for
accommodation and services, increasing the opportunity to gain access to
development finance, provide access to support programmes and the potential to
support companies gain access to market related networks.
• Developing specialisms in relation to supporting specific technology sectors.
• Developing working relationships with private sector groups to help develop
companies.
To understand better how these kinds of initiatives can be deployed it is of
value to review how the processes of pre and full incubation, technology accel-
eration, investment, growing enterprises and the regulatory frameworks overlay
technology, market and company journeys operate.
Although there is no single route through these different parts of the journey for
developing companies there are sufficient distinctive elements to enable these to be
classified and from that developed to become even more effective Fig. 10 .
The science park model adopted in Europe and US does have the capacity to
support R&D and some companies on these sites operate corporate development
laboratories; however, the majority of the work undertaken on these sites occurs
further up the value chain than the discovery stage. However, it is important to
have in place the necessary links to help connect ideas to the commercial sector.
In the last 5 years it has become more common for science and technology
parks to create and run pre-incubators Fig. 11 .
Pre incubation is an activity that has evolved on science parks as a social
development that is aimed at reducing the risk to entrepreneurs as they try to find
ways of commercialising the output from R&D.