Regional Innovation Support Systems and Technopoles - Technopolis: Best Practices for Science and Technology Cities - page 59

During a long time, regional innovation support systems did not exist in the
Netherlands, mainly due to the weak political and financial power of the provinces.
Recently, as the case of Utrecht shows, provinces are getting more active in
innovation policy, particularly as coordinators of policies and institutes devised
and financed at several spatial levels (local, national, EU) (IPO 2004 ). Interest-
ingly, in the case of Utrecht the Regional Innovation and Technology Transfer
Strategy (RITTS) supported by the EU set a process of regional coordination in
motion, first by the Utrecht Network for Innovation and Technology (Unité) and
most recently by on the Taskforce Innovatie Regio Utrecht (IPO 2004 ; TFI 2009 ).

5 Lessons for Science City Governance

To conclude, the above described regional innovation support systems and their
relations with technopoles in different countries of Western Europe differ strongly
from each other (Table 2 ). Furthermore, the innovation support systems also
change through time, and most of the time they develop in the direction of network
type of regional innovation support systems. Cooke ( 2007 ) also made this point
and ascribes this to the strong influence of EU programmes such as RITTS on
regional innovation support systems, particularly in politically more centralised
countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands. Arguably one tend to find smaller,
but better regionally embedded and integrated technopoles in countries with a
decentralised political-administrative structure, such as Germany.
As stated above, one of the main problems of many technopoles is the lack of
regional technology transfer and networking that take place both between firms
and between firms and higher education institutes and public research establish-
ments in the region. To solve this problem, technopoles need to be integrated in
wider regional innovation policies and strategies. These strategies should be based
both on thorough and in-depth studies of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities

Table 2 Regional innovation support systems compared

Baden-Württemberg
(Germany)

The North East of
England

Utrecht
(the Netherlands)

Initiation mainly regional

government

regional and central
government

central and increasingly
provincial government

Funding regional and national

agencies

regional and national
agencies

mainly national agencies

Research &
support

mixed mixed mainly basic

Specialisation mixed mixed mixed

Intra-regional
co-operation

high fair fair

Co-ordination high fair fair

Type of system between grassroots

and network

between dirigiste
and network

between dirigiste and network