Daejeon, KOREA
What does Calgary have in common with Phoenix and Austin in the U.S., as well as Bangalore in India, Nanjing in China and Novosibirsk in Russia?
One answer is that Calgary is one of 37 cities on the planet that belong to the Korea-based World Technopolis Association (WTA).
Should you care? And for that matter, what is a Technopolis anyway?
A high-powered group of business, government and education leaders struggled with that question for two days recently in Daejeon, Korea. That city is trying to establish itself as Korea’s Silicon Valley, and it’s already the home of many of Korea’s research institutes, ranging from government atomic energy labs to places that test household cleaning products.
According to the WTA, scientific research and technology development are the keys to long-term economic development. It’s hard to deny that when you look at places such as Seattle.
Of course they’re lucky enough to have Microsoft with almost half of its 49,000-person worldwide workforce in the Seattle region.
However, Prof. Donald Miller of the University of Washington in Seattle points out that there’s more to Seattle than Microsoft and Boeing.
Companies created as a result of University of Washington research directly account for at least 7,100 jobs in the local economy, with average salaries 60 per cent higher than the statewide average.
Many of these firms drew on expertise of Microsofties who left the corporate nest to try their entrepreneurial wings.
So the key seems to be having a strong university, which attracts lots of good people, and a range of companies large and small to employ them in high-value occupations.
Calgary is no slouch in creating new high-tech jobs and companies. As I reported at the conference, University Technologies International, Inc., the University of Calgary’s tech development company, has been involved in the launch or significant development of 30 companies involved in everything from telecommunications (Wi-Lan) to using plants as chemical factories (SemBioSys Genetics, Inc.) UTI is itself a successful company, having returned more than $15 million in royalties to the university since it was created in 1989.
(In Edmonton, the U of A’s Industry Liaison Office recently celebrated its own portfolio of successful spinoffs, which include firms such as Biomira Inc., Isotechnika Inc. and AltaRex Corp.)
One of the more interesting differences among the WTA cities is the role of government in fostering innovation.
In Korea, there are several large Technoparks which provide subsidized facilities to fledgling companies. They are often located at or near university campuses, and can be quite sizable. Kyungbuk Technopark, located on the campus of Youngnam University, has a land area of 463,000 square meters and a total investment equivalent to more than $60 million.
Have these government-sponsored parks actually worked? On the bright side, we were shown an array of innovations, from 3-D video games to a seemingly magical metal rod that heats water. All of these had some links to Korea’s technoparks and their earnest inventors were doing their best to convince us that they had something great.
However, conference organizer and Chungnam National University professor Dr. D.S. Oh raised some provocative questions in his analysis of the Korean technoparks. He notes that while they play a role in regional innovation and development, the technoparks share common problems such as weak links to existing regional industries.
In their rush to foster new companies, they have often ignored already existing ones. He also notes that “no private firms have been involved in the technopark business so far and the central government has led the process. It is not clear yet that local government technoparks would survive in the future because of this.”
Moving back to the North American context, president Lattie Coor of Arizona State University (ASU) predicted there will be a blurring of the lines between the academic and industrial sectors.
He sees universities such as his own taking an equity stake in companies based on professors’ inventions, and reports that ASU is in the process of creating a legal vehicle to do this. He also notes the importance of interconnectedness, which, for example, allows researchers around the world to work on the same data set.
That’s one of the reasons why an organization such as the WTA makes a lot of sense to those attending the meeting.
Perhaps the most novel folks I met at the conference were the Russians. Coming from places like Novosibirsk State University (NSU) and Inanovo State University of Chemistry and Technology, they showed a single-minded determination to turn university students into elite researchers.
Prof. N.S. Dikansky of Novosibirsk State says that by the time his students have reached the third year of study, they are working hands-on with researchers. By the time they defend their diplomas, they usually have several scientific publications.
Their faculty/student ratios are a dream: 2,000 fourth-year and fifth-year students, 1,200 professors and 3,800 PhD researchers. NSU’s employment figures aren’t so bad either – 99.9 per cent of the graduates find work right after graduation, in a country where the unemployment rate is about 20 per cent. So, what can we learn from other WTA members?
Countries such as Korea and Russia are really putting a priority on scientific research and allocating their scarce resources to it. The University of Washington, which doesn’t even have a technopark, probably doesn’t need one since the entire region is an incubator.
Calgary falls somewhere in between, with a lively group of companies located in the Alastair Ross Technology Centre, just north of the U of C campus.
Finally, we all need to get a lot better at working together across boundaries, since with the Internet there really aren’t any boundaries.
Anyone in the world can find out what technologies UTI has available for licensing just by going to its web page. Take a look, you just might find what you’re looking for right in your own backyard.
