• World Technopolis Review
• /
• v.3 no.3
• /
• pp.114-121
• /
• 2014

This paper presents two cases of Science and Technology Parks (STPs), from Malaysia and India, that are driven by business organisations in partnership with governments. The need to locate the STP near to a university or a research institute has been considered crucial to attract firms to the STP - but in this paper, we illustrate the efforts to develop a locally relevant STP through the cases of Pahang Bio Science in Malaysia and the ICICI Knowledge Park (now known as IKP) in Hyderabad India. These two developments are anchored by business organisations that are playing a pivotal role in their development. The government plays a supporting role in terms of policy and supplying certain complementary resources. In addition, we note that the government support also provides legitimacy for the business organisation developing the STP. In the case of the Malaysian STP, we note the approach is towards inclusive development by developing linkages to local communities, and in the case of the Indian STP, one can see the development of the STP in a dynamic way changing according to the needs of the sector. Especially interesting is the foresight by the nodal business organisations in developing the STPs.

• World Technopolis Review
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.74-81
• /
• 2019

Cities will soon host two third of the population worldwide, and already today 80% of the world energy is used in the 20 largest cities. Urban areas create 80% of the greenhouse gas emission, so we should take care that urban areas are smart and sustainable as implementations have especially here the greatest impact. Smart Cities (SC) or Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC) are the actual concepts that describe methodologies how cities can handle the high density of citizens, efficiency of energy use, better quality of life indicators, high attractiveness for foreign investments, high attractiveness for people from abroad and many other critical improvements in a shifting environment. But if we talk about Entrepreneurship Ecosystem and Innovation, we do not see a lot of literature covering this topic within those SC/SSC concepts. It seems that 'Smart' implies that all is embedded, or isn't it properly covered as brick stone of SC/SSC concepts, as they are handled in another 'responsibility silo', meaning that the policy implementation of a Science and Technology Park (STP) is handled in another governing body than SC/SSC developments. If this is true, we will obviously miss a lot of synergy effects and economies of scale effects. Effects that we could have in case we stop the siloed approaches of STPs by following a more holistic concept of a Smart Sustainable City, covering also a continuous flow of innovation into the city, without necessarily always depend on large corporate SSC solutions. We try to argue that every SSC should integrate SP/STP concepts or better their features and services into their methodology. The very limited interconnectivity between these concepts within the governance models limits opportunities and performance in both systems. Redesigning the architecture of the governance models and accepting that we have to design a system-of-systems would support the possible technology flow for smart city technologies, it could support testbed functionalities and the public-private partnership approach with embedded business models. The challenge is of course in complex governance and integration, as we often face siloed approaches. But real SSC are smart as they are connecting all those unconnected siloes of stakeholders and technologies that are not yet interoperable. We should not necessarily follow anymore old greenfield approaches neither in SSCs nor in SP and STP concepts from the '80s that don't fit anymore, being replaced by holistic sustainability concepts that we have to implement in any new or revised SSC concepts. There are new demands for each SP/STP being in or close to an SC/SCC as they have a continuous demand for feeding the technology base and the application layer and should also act as testbeds. In our understanding, a big part of STP inputs and outputs are still needed, but in a revised and extended format. We know that most of the SC/STP studies claim the impact is still far from understood and often debated, therefore we must transform the concepts where SC/STPs are not own 'cities', but where they act as technology source and testbed for industry and new SSC business models, being part of the SC/STP concept and governance from the beginning.