PLENARY SESSIONS:

PLE1: Marketing Science Parks – Attracting & Keeping World Class Customers

Besides stimulating and supporting the creation of new technology-based firms through incubation and spin-off mechanisms, the overwhelming majority of Science and Technology Parks (STPs) in the world also seek to attract mature companies to their sites.

Attracting top class companies is important not only for the Park’s financials, but also for its prestige and international visibility.

STPs want and need to attract and keep world class customers.

An adequate marketing strategy is key to the success in this endeavour.

For this session we are looking for papers discussing one of the two following aspects of the session’s theme:

• Ideas and suggestions on how to design and structure a successful international marketing strategy for STPs: key concepts and messages, identification and segmentation of targets, smart marketing actions, marketing means and vehicles, cost/results efficiency of the marketing actions, etc. In other words, we are looking for papers that can help STPs’ CEOs and Marketing Managers to fine-tune their knowledge and understanding of international marketing applied to Science Parks.
• Best practices: the Conference Steering Committee will also take into consideration paper proposals that analyse actual marketing strategies that have been used by STPs and that have proven to be successful. Nevertheless, paper proposals that choose this case study/best practice angle must definitely be more than a mere descriptive exercise, and should include analytical elements conducive to a clear understanding of why a particular marketing strategy was successful. Plain descriptive papers without further analysis or abstraction will not be taken in for this section.

In any case, the Steering Committee will value positively the international approach of the paper proposals, favouring those which deal with international marketing strategies or successful cases of attracting foreign companies, rather than papers approaching the topic from a local/national perspective.

PLE2: The Present and Future of Science Parks around the World

The STP concept has already existed for nearly half a century and since the early 1980s it has become an ever growing worldwide phenomenon.

This plenary session intends to make a substantial contribution to the analysis and understanding of the STP phenomenon from different angles. To put it in a nutshell, the key question for which we would like to get answers is: where are we and where are we headed?

As the transition from the industrial (nation-state based) economy to the knowledge (global-based) economy gains momentum and continues to accelerate, we need to understand the role of STPs in this transition as well as how the transition affects STPs.

Are there new models of STPs coming out? What are their main features? How do they differ from the older models? Are there new fundamental strategies that STPs need consider? Who are the new STP customers? What about the international/global dimension of STPs? Can regional-based STPs survive? What does “International Science Park” really mean? Are STPs emerging into multinational corporations?

These are but a few questions that papers intended for this session could be addressing. There are however several more:

Will the relationship between STPs and Universities change in the future? In which direction? Will Science Parks end up creating their own universities? How can STPs enhance alternative sources of knowledge and technology creation that can be transferred into the market place?

What about the relationship between STPs and cities?

Are STPs destined to become “specialized neighbourhoods” (the knowledge neighbourhoods” or the “creative-class neighbourhoods”) of a city? Will or should STP incorporate residential areas?

Papers for this session might address these topics from different angles: sociological, economical, socio-political, etc. In any case, the Steering Committee will evaluate the proposals according to the following criteria:

1. Originality and insight of the theoretical framework used.
2. Applicability of the theoretical concepts and findings to practical situations: we encourage authors to propose a practical set of conclusions and recommendations that could be useful for STPs’ practitioners as well as for social economic researchers conducting surveys and studies about the Science Park phenomenon.

In other words, we wish to remind the authors that the audience of the session will include a large number of STP managers, directors and executives, whose main aim is to get inputs enabling them to improve the management of their respective parks and to prepare them for the future.

PLE3: Discovering & Creating Born Global Companies

The increasing globalisation of markets and internationalisation of the world economy is producing a very challenging and interesting phenomenon: an increasing number of companies, especially technology-based ones, are now international from their very inception. In other words, instead of following the (until recently) logical process of growing from local/national to international, they skip the first “old fashioned” stage and are international from birth.

Of course, this is rendered possible by the ever amazing development of ICTs, the increasing mobility of people and the vanishing of frontiers in the global world. These processes enable people from different countries and cultural backgrounds to meet and join efforts, creating companies that have, from the very beginning, local knowledge about different contexts, pre-existing networks in different countries and international composition of their shareholders. In other words, they are born international.

This international entrepreneurship could be a very interesting development for STPs.

In this session we wish to understand how this is actually happening. How can STPs screen out emerging projects of this nature in order to attract them to the Park? How can they stimulate international entrepreneurship within the Park? Is international incubation a new discipline? What are its main features?

And how about the “international entrepreneurs” themselves? What are the main obstacles that they might have to overcome? It seems obvious that their internationality offers a set of advantages, but what are the disadvantages? How can STPs strengthen the former and reduce the latter?

These are but a few of the many topics that can be discussed in this session.

We encourage the authors proposing papers to this session to analyse the topic from the Science Parks’ point of view, but also from the entrepreneurs’ point of view and their concerns.

PLE4: How Science Parks Can Enhance Regional Growth Strategies

The role of STPs as tools for regional development has been widely acknowledged, but we always need to deepen our understanding of how they can excel in enhancing regional growth strategies, especially from the perspective of the global knowledge economy.

Are STPs efficient access doors for their respective regions to the global knowledge economy? Could this be their central role today and in the near future, or are there other equally important (if not more so) roles for STPs within their regional context? What, then, are the main strategy axes for Science Parks as engines of regional growth? Is the function of linking university and industry still the central one, or should STPs switch their attention to other issues and concerns?

Moreover, paper proposals for this session might like considering other points of view to address the sessions theme such as the dimension of the concept “region” in today’s changing world and its relation to other social, economical and political units (city, nation-state, or supranational units/interregional territorial units).

How do regions relate to and integrate with the new global economy? What is the position and role of STPs in this relation?

We are particularly interested in understanding how all these things actually affect and influence innovative and knowledge-based companies, for example how can STPs enhance the internationalisation of regional companies, (what does “regional company” mean nowadays? To what extent can a company that becomes international, operates in international markets, etc. can be considered regional?)

PARALLEL SESSIONS:

PAR1: Providing Customer-Driven Science Park Services

Services, especially highly value-added ones, are the trademark of STPs.

Science Park managers must ensure that the services provided by or at their parks are truly quality services; but of course they must also make sure that they provide the services that are really needed and demanded by their resident companies (tenants).

This market-driven approach is absolutely crucial for the good performance of any Science Park.

We need to understand exactly what these services are, and which ones might become superfluous, take a vigilant attitude about the changing needs of the companies, and develop systematic methods to grasp and follow-up those needs.

This is not exactly an easy task in any case, but it turns particularly difficult at the early stages of the life of a Science Park, since the manager must often make decisions a priori and organise a minimum set of services to create an initial offering.

This session is intended to enlighten how STPs can provide services that respond to the real needs (present or future) of the companies.

Analysing examples of successful services provided by different STPs across the globe can also be a good approach to the aims of this session, provided that the papers are not just a simple enumeration of services or the simple description of the services that a given Science Park provides.

Case studies should necessarily include: (i) a brief description of the services discussed, indicating its main elements, and the value added that it is supposed to provide; (ii) a comparative analysis enabling the audience to understand why one particular service is more successful than another.

It is certainly useful for the audience of this session to receive to a list of services that STPs could implement, but the analysis of some of these services is a prerequisite for the selection of papers for this session.

PAR 2: The International Dimension of Science Parks

This session offers space for a more practical approach to some of the topics discussed in the plenary sessions.

We welcome papers addressing the international dimension of Science Parks through the analysis of real cases.

The international dimension of STPs can refer to a variety of things:

1. The transnational (border) Science Park concept.
2. STPs whose main focus is on attracting foreign companies and international investments.
3. International strategic alliances of Science Parks.
4. International services: STPs supporting their companies to become international, to access international markets, etc.
5. STPs establishing offices or delegations in third countries.
6. STPs involved in human resources mobility programmes, etc.

Case studies are welcome in this session as long as they are more than a descriptive exercise. On the contrary, case studies must forcefully include a critical analysis and a set of “lessons to be learned” that one can draw from the initial description.

PAR 3: Smart Networking

Smart Networking or “networking that gets results” is the topic of this session.

We seek to understand the nature of networking better, and to learn how STPs should network. Networking today has an undeniable strategic value, and therefore it must be considered from the corporate strategy point of view.

Smart Networking is more than travelling around the world: it requires a budget, good networkers (what is the profile of a good networker today?), clearly defined objectives, a good methodology to check the results of the networking activities of the Park, and the adequate means to network successfully.

Networking should be part of any business and strategy plan for STPs.

In addition to all this, STPs networking has a triple dimension:

1. Networking amongst STPs managers worldwide.
2. Networking amongst companies located in one STP.
3. Networking amongst companies located in different STPs worldwide.

The aim of this session is to better understand what networking is, to eradicate common misconceptions in this respect and to provide STPs managers with practical knowledge and hints to improve their networking services.

PAR 4: Case Finland: Small is Beautiful?

Cold Finland is hot! Big in surface but with small population, in the Northern extreme of Europe, Finland is consistently ranked in the top places of all the classifications related to competitiveness, innovation, technology and knowledge economy.

Are the Finns a breed apart, or are they just doing their homework well? More specifically, are there lessons to be learned here by other small, open economies as to how to flourish amid the giants?

Our Conference will be held in Helsinki. This is a great opportunity for all delegates to get to know better the Finland phenomenon, understand its causes, examine the policies and mechanisms implemented in Finland and conducive to their spectacular development, and to draw lessons from the Finnish experience. We welcome papers that will account for “Case Finlandia” and that will analyse its strengths as well as its weaknesses, particularly in those aspects related to STPs and their role in these processes.