From science cities to science parks: new models for innovation
Axel Soojung-Kim Pang, research director at the Institute for the Future and lead blogger of the Institute’s Future Now website sent me some thoughts on how the isolated, autonomous science city has now been displaced by the model of science parks or neighborhoods.
The science city, he argues, was an exercise in state direction of science, and government use of science for direct national and economic ends; the purest expression of the science city was a facility like Los Alamos, the United States’ primary atomic weapons design laboratory. The science park, in contrast, tends to be an incubator, a place designed to attract a hetereogeneous array of talent and interest who then develop and pursue their own projects.
He also posted a rather long list of links to publications and websites about science parks, technology cities, technopoles and other regional innovation systems. The list includes the special issue on global competition of high-tech centres in the International Journal of Technology Management.
Well, I had a brainstorm about the meaning of the shift from science cities to science parks, and what it tells us about the place of science– in both the geographical and social senses– in the world.