Building STP’s Ecosystem: Kitakyushu Approach - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 402

Fig. 2 Synthesis of three streams of thought in the technopolis concept. Source Tatsuno ( 1986 ,

p. 123)

through partnerships between businesses in the same industry and across industrial
sectors. Those networks, through synergetic sharing of participant's intellectual
and other resources, will then reach the state in which they generated new
industries and businesses, mainly in their regions.
The most salient keyword in this project is innovation. In concrete terms, it
means exerting a significant impact on the economy and society by marketing
competitive products and commodities based on new technologies and ideas. The
basic idea of this project is to prepare regional environments to give rise to a
stream of innovations. Three major missions of this project are as follows:

1. Preparing a business environment that promotes innovation.
2. Creating new industries in the fields defined as of strategic importance in the
Economic Growth Initiative and other national programs. 7
3. Fostering the emergence of synergistic effects through tie-ups with the regional
promotion policies that local governments and other bodies implement.

In a change from implementing policies uniformly throughout Japan under
centralized management, policies are implemented first and foremost by those
actually working in their fields under the field workers who know the best prin-
ciple. The project secures the appropriate tools for constructing the networks that
are the cores of clusters and strategically applies the policies and programs of other
ministries, departments, bureaus, and organizations in and out of the region to
support research and development of other tools, partnerships between businesses,

7 This project is positioned as a core strategy in Japan's Economic Growth Initiative and the
Third Term Science and Technology Basic Plan.