Institute For The Future

Science Cities: Japan's Technopolis program

I'm working with Anthony Townsend on an article on shifts in the way science parks and science cities-- or more broadly, spaces designed specifically to attract and support science-based research, innovation, and product development-- are organized, and their future.

The basic argument is that changes how these facilities are planned, sited, and managed represent a set of bigger shifts in the way that governments and corporations organize -- that, essentially, you can read the future of innovation in the plans for places like BioX at Stanford, QB3 in San Francisco, Korea's Digital Media City, and Denmark's Katrinebjerg.

One interesting precedent is Japan's Technopolis program, which operated during the 1980s and 1990s under the management of MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry). The program was widely-heralded when it started, but was shut down in 1998. Its failure tells us something about what regions need to do to create sustainable innovation-- which is what the new science city movement is all about.

Shigeru Suzuki, "Technopolis: Science Parks in Japan," International Journal of Technology Management 28 (2004), 582-601.

The Technopolis program was created to "promote the new location of high-technology industries in local areas, create a lot of high quality jobs, and bring economic propserity to local areas." (583) However, a combination of macroeconomic factors (high exchange rates that encouraged Japanese companies to transfer factories abroad, and the recession of the 1990s) and organizational factors (bureaucratic conflict, academic culture) contributed to its failure. The program was abolished in 1998, and MITI "changed its policy from developing science parks to promoting venture business and links between universities and industries." (583)

Old Industries. The recession of the 1970s represented an opportunity to remake the Japanese economic landscape. The oil shocks drove a fundamental shift in the Japanese economy away from heavy industry (steel, aluminum, chemicals, shipbuilding, etc.) and to more knowledge-intensive industries (e.g. semiconductors, electronics, biotech).

Old industries tended to be located in coastal areas, on reclaimed land. Not only were they often geographically isolated from existing cities, they tended to be intellectually isolated: "there was a big technical gap between... big companies and existent traditional small and medium-sized companies," and "little technical transfer from the former to the latter." (588) New companies like Mitsubishi, in contrast, tended to be more labor-intensive, and thus needed to be close to population centers; their products were also moved by truck or plane (rather than ships), so they preferred to be near highways and airports.

The Technopolis program. After the Technopolis Act of 1983, MITI chose 9 areas for Technopolis support; in 1985 another 9 were added; by 1989, the Act supported 26 areas. Each area had to have a technical university, a core city (often rather small compared to Tokyo or Osaka), and the possibility of attracting high-tech industry. Technopolis-sponsored science parks were thus spread around the country; the largest employed 2,500 people from 68 companies. A number of governments used Technopolis funds to reconstruct pre-WWII public institutes for industry and technology, which had been underfunded and ignored by emerging industries (which tended to build their own facilities). However, they didn't invest in research staff.

Local governments and industry funded Foundation for Technopolis development programs, to build and manage the science parks, lure high-technology factories, and support start-ups. However, while some of the foundations were well-funded, most were poorly-managed, relied on temporary staff seconded from industry or local government, and didn't acquire management, sales/marketing, or business support expertise.

From 1987, The Technopolis program also competed with a Ministry of Education program to develop centers for regional cooperative research and development. The program was not particularly well-funded or successful: the number of patents generated was quite small, for example, and universities tended to be too restrictive regarding faculty participation in cooperative programs. Yet its biggest successes, in established universities like Tokyo, Oaska, Kyushu, and Tohoku, still exceeded the achievements of the Technopolis areas.