Regional Innovation Support Systems and Technopoles - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 44

Castells and Hall ( 1994 ) it is not sufficient to simply provide the networks in a
physical sense at technopoles, it is also necessary to take definite steps to open up
the social networks and break down barriers to networking.
One of the main weaknesses, particularly with technopoles planned by central
government, is that technopole plans are often over-ambitious and focus on sev-
eral, often the same, technologies and industries. Planners often forget that dif-
ferent technopole policies are appropriate to different levels of regional
development (Castells and Hall 1994 ). At lower development levels, relatively
modest technology parks will be perfectly appropriate. Particularly in the latter
case, it is necessary to concentrate on one or two target areas or niches that are best
adapted to local needs and facilities such as regional higher education institutes,
public research establishments, industrial traditions, entrepreneurial capacities and
political leadership in the region.
Since many technopoles are specialised in the same fields, such as in micro-
electronics or in biotechnology, recently voices have become louder stressing the
need for diversification (Hassink and Hu 2012 ). Interesting theoretical concepts in
that respect are regional innovation platforms (Harmaakorpi et al. 2011 ) and
regional branching (Boschma and Frenken 2011 ), which could be applied in order to
promote diversification of techopoles into related and unrelated technology fields.
In most advanced industrialised countries, such as the USA, Germany and to
some extent Japan, the technopole concept seems to have reached some form of
saturation. In these countries, therefore, technopoles are certainly in the maturity
or even declining phase of their life cycle. With regard to science parks in the
USA, Luger and Goldstein ( 1991 ) detected some degree of saturation already in
1991, as they stated that any new research park will have more difficulties,
especially if it is not linked to a higher education institute/public research estab-
lishment and/or located in peripheral areas. Similar conclusions were drawn by
Sternberg et al. ( 1996 ) with regard to Germany. In a European context Komninos
( 1997 :193) clearly sees technopoles at the end of their life cycle, particularly if
they are put in the wider range of innovation support initiatives: ''… the spread of
new effective tools for technology transfer, based on networks, institutions and
services, questions the established character of technopolitan development. The
novel feature of these tools is that they operate without property or spatially
polarised dimensions''. Annerstedt ( 2006 , 279), however, has a contrasting view,
as he states that ''over the past 10 years, with the promotion by policymakers of
specialised, local 'clusters' of firms and supporting institutions as strategic means
for industrial policy, science parks have come back into the limelight of the centre
stage for industrial policy deliberations'' (see also OECD 2011 ).
In this chapter we will argue that technopoles need to be well integrated in
regional innovation support systems in order to tackle the problem of lacking
technology transfer and networking. In the following, we will therefore analyse
regional innovation support systems in more detail, both theoretically in the next
section and empirically in Sect. 4 . We will take an evolutionary stance in doing
this and will link the development stage of national economies with the life cycle
of technopoles and the related regional innovation support systems.