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tool has been criticised for not sufficiently supporting regional networking and
technology transfer to regional firms.
At the same time there have been arguments in favour of putting technopoles in
a broader perspective of regional innovation support systems (OECD
2011
). The
aim of this Chapter is therefore to analyse the contribution of regional innovation
support systems to the development of technopoles. Based on some empirical
examples of regional innovation support systems in Western Europe, that is Great
Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, the Chapter uses a typology of these sys-
tems, consisting of grassroots, networked and dirigiste kind of systems (Cooke
2004
). In the next two sections we will further introduce technopoles (
Sect. 2
) and
regional innovation support systems (
Sect. 3
). In
Sect. 4
we will then describe the
empirical examples, whereas conclusions and lessons will be drawn in
Sect. 5
.
2 Technopoles
According to Castells and Hall (
1994
), technopoles are cities, suburbs or even rural
areas whose existence is dominated by the presence of high technology in the form
of research, development, manufacturing or some combination of all three. They
may be planned or unplanned, privately financed, publicly financed or set up by
public-private partnerships. They come in several varieties and have many different
names. The French word 'technopole' is used to describe them all generically. They
are also called science cities and in this Chapter both terms will be used synony-
mously. Technopoles are located all over the world, but mostly in North America,
Europe and East Asia. The most famous technopole, Silicon Valley, came into
existence in the 1960s in what was then basically a rural area. Others, such as Route
128 in Greater Boston, are found in the suburbs of huge metropolitan areas. Suc-
cessful technopoles are characterised by synergy between industry, academia and
government. Although any region can have higher education institutes, public
research establishments, high-tech firms or even all three at once, that alone does
not guarantee the special kind of relationship that generates synergy.
The success of unplanned technopoles, such as Silicon Valley and Los Angeles,
inspired other countries to deliberately create their own (Castells and Hall
1994
).
This Chapter will focus on these technopoles as planned policy concepts. In fact,
many scholars regard just these planned concepts as technopoles. Lagendijk and
Charles (
1998
:16), for instance, define technopoles as ''a land and property-based
form of technology policy, geared towards the establishment of a spatial
agglomeration of hi-tech businesses and organisations''. The first examples of
these planned technopoles are, among others, Sophia-Antipolis in France, Daedeok
Innopolis (formerly known as Daedeok Science Town) in South Korea, Tsukuba
Science City in Japan and Akademgorodok in the former Soviet Union (Castells
and Hall
1994
). There are large variations between the characteristics and scopes
of technopoles between different countries. In Europe, for instance, where tech-
nopoles were established in two waves (1969-1973 and 1983-1993) (Komninos
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