Institute For The Future

Should America Create Innovation Zones to Spur R&D?

I spent the morning reading through a report released earlier this month by the Association of University Research Parks (AURP), titled New York Times pointed out this week how surprisingly little of the campaign has focused on innovation policies.)

 

My main beef with this proposal is that it is (understandably) somewhat self-serving for the university research park community. If this framework were adopted – and with an increasingly likely Obama administration voted in by a metropolitan, college-educated constituency it has a good chance – the net result would most likely be a dramatic expansion of the number and size of these kinds of facilities. This would not in and of itself be a bad thing. If asked, I’d probably testify in favor of AURP’s recommendations across the board.

 

However, I think that saying research parks are the only “places” where we find communities of innovation is just too limiting for a country as big and diverse as the United States. I move through communities of innovation on a daily basis, and I rarely step foot into any of the places that AURP proposes to classify as “innovation zones”.

 

The research framework for Science In Place over the next year takes a slightly more holistic approach to thinking about the future of place in research and innovation. Rather than starting from a position that place is paramount in organizing innovation, we want to step back and ask “how will place play a role in future innovation?”

 

The reason we’re starting here is that quite simply, the most exciting developments in collaborative research and innovation are happening online. From the Public Library of Science to the Journal of Visualized Experiments, the convergence of social networking and open publishing (in a variety of media) is rocking the foundations of the scientific establishment. Every institution, from scientific societies to corporate R&D groups to academic departments, are going to evolve in response to the historic opening of scientific communities and discourse that’s underway.

The other big trend on our radar is a concurrent explosion in meetings, meetups, conferences and workshops that seek to promote cross-organizational and cross-disciplinary conversations. In many emerging fields, conference presentations count more than journal articles. Many of these meetings are ad hoc and self-organized, like the BioBarCamp hosted by IFTF this summer. Hackers in Kenya recently stunned the technorati by coming together 400-strong for a BarCamp Nairobi of their own. At our recent brainstorming workshop in Johannesburg with leading science park managers from around the world, one of the most intriguing forecasts was that we’d see more “temporary science parks” over the next decade. The group quickly added to that, noting that in reality all science parks are temporary in the long run.

 

Putting these two trends together, we can start to build a set of questions for forecasting the future of place in research and innovation. How will new virtual collaboration networks and practices be embedded in existing places? What new pressures will they create for linking virtual communities and place? How will places need to adapt to serve ephemeral communities instead of fixed ones? What role will places play in a more fluid, more mobile global research community? How do people creating places for research and innovation harness and leverage the potential of social networks?

 

For more of the trends, questions and insights that are shaping our inquiry into the future of place in research and innovation, please explore the interactive map of the Future of Science and Technology Parks and Innovation Regions, which lays out the results of our research agenda brainstorming workshop held last month in South Africa.