Regional Innovation Support Systems and Technopoles - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 41

Regional Innovation Support Systems
and Technopoles

Robert Hassink and Su-Hyun Berg

Abstract In the 1990s, technopoles, a land and property-led technology policy
concept which aims at spatially clustering high-tech firms and R&D organisations,
have been very popular among local, regional and national policymakers to boost
regional economic growth. No matter how they are called, be it science parks,
technopoles, high-tech centres, incubator centres, technology parks, technoparks,
science cities or innopolis, they have given hopes to policymakers in many countries
to boost regional technology transfer, innovativeness and hence competitiveness.

1 Introduction

In the 1990s, technopoles, a land and property-led technology policy concept which
aims at spatially clustering high-tech firms and R&D organisations, have been very
popular among local, regional and national policymakers to boost regional eco-
nomic growth. No matter how they are called, be it science parks, technopoles,
high-tech centres, incubator centres, technology parks, technoparks, science cities
or innopolis, they have given hopes to policymakers in many countries to boost
regional technology transfer, innovativeness and hence competitiveness. Many
detailed studies have been done both on technopoles in individual countries such as
the USA (Luger and Goldstein 1991 ), Japan (Bass 1998 ) and Germany (Sternberg
et al. 1996 ) and on technopoles in an international comparative perspective in order
to find some lessons that could be learned from successes and failures (Castells and
Hall 1994 ). Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept seems to
have reached some point of saturation, particularly in industrialised countries such
as the USA, Western Europe and Japan. Moreover, this mainly property-led policy