Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Phase Z.Ro and the future of innovation
As I was walking down the hill from Biopolis, I saw a little development between the Ministry of Education and the subway stop: several yellow buildings that announced themselves as the Phase Z.Ro, a "technopreneur park."
via flickr
If Biopolis seemed familiar, an attempt to outdo Western scientific facilities on their own terms, Z.Ro (get it?) struck me as something potentially quite different. For one thing, the place makes your average Silicon Valley tilt-up look like Versailles. For another, while it definitely didn't have the energy of downtown Palo Alto or the Google campus, some elements of the space made me wonder if its creators aren't onto something. And even if they fail, this may be something to watch... and worry about.
one of the three wings of phase z.ro (this one is called "breakthrough"), via flickr
Phase Z.Ro consists of three two-story buildings, all made of prefabricated panels. They look like cargo containers that have been painted yellow, had windows and doors punched in them, and wired with AC and Cat-6 cable.
cargo container chic, via flickr
Interestingly, the same company-- JTC-- that built Biopolis is responsible for Phase Z.Ro, and several other "technopreneur" parks. So they're playing both ends of the market.
Each one of the buildings has a sunshade, but is open on the ends, allowing in some extra light and breeze. Along the long axes of the buildings are hung white panels with, well, buzzwords. The language of technology, of innovation, of entrepreneurship literally hangs in the air.
words words words-- the language (or at least jargon) of innovation floats above the offices; via flickr
One of the other buildings ("Breakthrough") has text above it that includes
creatively knitted tapestry of new economy industry, hubs
business intelligence centre
a place of competitive risk taking
It seems kind of ridiculous-- you'd never see this kind of thing in the Valley-- but I think it's more than just decoration or mindless jargon; I think it needs to be taken seriously, as a very public declaration of some very big ambitions. Certainly they're talking about the right kinds of things, and even if the place didn't seem very busy when I was there, it's cheap enough an infrastructure to replicate easily.
Perhaps cheap enough to do with these parks what venture capitalists do: fund lots of them, knowing that most will be failures, but hoping that a couple will be home runs.
in the shadow of biopolis (that's helios in the background), via flickr
Now, imagine something else. There's a lot of work going on right now in service science-- essentially, efforts to create a discipline for technical services akin to computer science or electrical engineering, which will put this increasingly important economic activity on a sound theoretical foundation, and allow us to start overcoming the problems of scale and labor intensivity that limit the growth of service businesses today.
Phase Z.Ro strikes me as a very cheap physical infrastructure. What if, in ten years' time, we know enough about multiplying and scaling services to make it possible to provide not just conference rooms and plug-and-play Internet with these spaces, but also access to capital, patent law services, managerial interventions, and so on? You've already got a science and technology park that packs into a couple shipping container, maybe with a backup generator and a few servers. What if you could add VCs and a law firm to the mix?
This leads me to a wildcard.
imagine unpacking little innovation parks all over asia, via flickr
Imagine if you could mass-produce these facilities, and drop them in cities and near universities throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. You could deploy thousands of them. Most of them would fizzle out. A few would thrive. A very few would incubate the next Google.
Spaces like this could, in the global battle for innovation and talent, and the competition to encourage high-tech entrepreneurship, be the equivalent of the disruptive innovation that's too cheap for established competitors to respond to. Silicon Valley might be to these parks what a private concert is to the radio: irreproducible in its intimacy and intellectual firepower, and in the grand scheme of things irrelevant because it was irreproducible.