Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Gyeonggi Province of Korea is no exception. It has been developing various
innovation clusters by locating science and technology organizations at close
distance. Among them, Gwanggyo Technovalley (GTV) and Pangyo Technovalley
(PTV) are the two leading technological complexes of Gyeonggi Province. In
particular, GTV has emerged as a kind of innovation cluster, where research
institutes, universities, and industries are at close distance and interact together for
better innovation, when Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology (AICT)
was opened in March 2008.
However, there seem to be many operational issues such as networking among
innovation actors, marketing of GTV, and so on. Currently, GTV does not have a
dedicated managerial body and therefore has some difficulties to coordinate
activities among the tenant companies and research institutes. Since GTV is
established recently, it may be too early to evaluate its performance. However, it is
worthwhile to evaluate in the context of innovation cluster and draw some policy
lessons. As it is the regional government-driven innovation cluster of Korea, it will
give some insight to look at the typical issues of innovation cluster development in
the regional innovation system.
In order to evaluate the GTV in the context of innovation cluster, the S&T
policy of Gyeonggi Province was reviewed. In addition, a survey was conducted to
find out the direction of GTV for the tenant companies and research institutes in
GTV. Finally the conclusion was drawn to suggest the direction of the regional
innovation policy in Gyeonggi province.
2 Concepts of Innovation Cluster
First of all, it has to be mentioned that innovation cluster is different from other
similar concepts such as technopark, science park, technolopolis, technovalley and
so on. Since there are many similar concepts for innovation cluster, it is necessary
to compare and clarify the related concepts. Generally speaking, the science park
was established to commercialize the R&D output of the university. That is why it
is often located at or nearby the university campus. After the science park, similar
complex came out in various names. It seems that science town refers to bigger
complex than science park. Later technology park came out and it focuses more on
industrial technology or applied science than science park. Then the name of
valley started to be widely used after imitating the Silicon Valley. Now, people
widely call those science and technology focused complexes, regardless of the size
and specialization focus, as the Science and Technology Park (STP).
OECD (
1999
) argued that the cluster approach can be very effective in pro-
moting industrial development. It uses the terminology innovative cluster, which
can cover from production to science-oriented cluster. Yim (
2000
) instead started
to use the innovation cluster, which mainly covers the science and technology
park. The innovation cluster can be defined as a networked group of innovation
actors and location(s), where the actors are creating economic and technological
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