Building STP’s Ecosystem: Kitakyushu Approach - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 426

use facilities. Within these facilities, besides, the Collaboration Center, the
Semiconductor Center, the IT Advancement Center have some rental labs and
project rooms for private companies, and the Annex of Collaboration Center is a
core building for joint research among the tenant companies. Networking in the
KSRP is more expanded through these facilities to industries.
Then, the roles of two organizations are very important for networking, espe-
cially networking of networks: the Campus Management Committee as an
''interface'' and the FAIS as a ''coupler.'' As mentioned above, the Campus
Management Committee consisted of the member HEIs in the KSRP plans policies
on which it jointly worked and decides the contents offered through the facilities
though the municipality bore the expense for the facilities construction. It means
that the Campus Management Committee is the point that the member HEIs meet
and interact together and it makes a kind of ''protocol'' which is a set of rules
governing the interaction among them. And the FAIS, as a coupler, connects two
different constituents with each other and makes them just like one system through
promoting various projects such as joint research, study group, technology trans-
fer, etc., with the Campus Management Committee.
If we can say that the essence of innovation is ''new combination,'' networking
is, on the context of STP's ecosystem, a kind of social innovation for technological
innovation because the various participants of STP development are intercon-
nected with one another and interacted with some creative new ways to create new
technology through new combination of knowledge. That is why industry-gov-
ernment-academia relationship has attracted considerable attention as the key to
innovation in increasingly knowledge-based societies. But, the important thing is
not the relationship itself but the way of interaction. In other words, an industry-
government-academia relationship itself is not new one. The real new one that we
have to find out to create innovation is the way of interaction among industry,
government, and academia. A triple helix concept of industry-government-aca-
demia interactions, though a little complicated, is a good example from this point
of view (Etzkowits 2008 ). Therefore, building STP's ecosystem without some
strategic considerations for networking as the way of interaction among its par-
ticipants cannot be a tool to promote innovation and national development. The
Kitakyushu approach explains the matter clearly.
4.2 Clustering of Networking Sequences
It is not easy to find more suitable paths of networking on building STP's eco-
system because it is very variable according to the conditions and circumstances.
In this chapter, therefore, we try to elucidate its process with clustering of net-
working sequences from the point of view of regional system of innovation.