The benefits of Technology Parks

Clever Country Revisited

Roy Chapman is the general manager of Innovation Services and Technology Parks at WA’s Department of Industry and Resources. He oversees Technology Park Bentley, often considered Australia’s leading technology park, and the Australian Marine Complex, whose tenants come from the marine, defence, and oil and gas industries.

He says government legislation made provision for the parks to add value to existing sectors, a move now seen as prescient considering Australia’s current ‘brain drain’. “When we had one technology park, Bentley, the philosophy was diversifying the state’s economy away from our resource base. We wanted to demonstrate to international investors that the state was more than a big quarry,” he explains. “Technology parks, certainly in the 1980s, served to demonstrate that there was a collection of non-research industries. And while they were fledgling, they were contributing.”

While Bentley grew into an ICT-dominated park, the WA Government noted a dearth in intellectual capital in emerging areas, which brought them to construct the Australian Marine Complex next to marine defence capabilities and shipbuilders. This saw the added bonus of spreading the knowledge. “There are a lot of spin-off companies, mainly people who were leaving industry sectors and opening their own businesses, providing services back to the core companies or taking the knowledge and transferring it to other areas,” says Chapman. “A lot of the ICT companies support the resource companies but some have used the technology to go into agriculture or medicine because it can be applied in those areas.”

Western Australia is arguably the most advanced of all the states in terms of its technology park initiatives. With ICT and marine activities covered, the state has since planned two bioparks, one adjoining the University of Western Australia and another near the QE2 medical facility. “It’s great that they have a huge concentration of research facilities, but you really need to have some commercialisation facilities,” says Chapman. “A similar theory has been applied to Murdoch University and is part of the excellent development of the Stanley Hospital, which will service the southern metropolitan region.”

Collaboration is a key element in furthering the technology park concept and embedding it into what will eventually become a knowledge economy, hence the formation of the association Technology Parks and Incubators Australia.

“Western Australia was one of the founding members of Technology Parks and Incubators Australia. We started as park managers talking to each other on the phone and visiting each other and we thought a profession association would look at the issues in membership, what we should be doing and so on,” describes Chapman of the group’s founding.

“The association has evolved to showcase the various things that go on in Australia. We certainly have our voice heard in the right place. Canberra certainly knows we exist and we have become a mouthpiece for representation to the IASP [International Association of Science Parks]. We’re better positioned now than we were in the formative years,” he states.

The association tackles issues concerning the intellectual and commercial development of technology parks, from monitoring changes and trends to implementing programs. “Also making sure we network with the relevant federal and state government representatives [as to] how the park can be used as a vehicle or an economic development tool,” adds Chapman. “And bringing the universities into it as well. Tertiary institutions have started to take the research and development commercialisation a bit more seriously.”

Despite all this forward thinking, Chapman says it pays to see where new technology and new businesses can be applied to existing markets, a mark of maturing technology parks. He recalls how parks lost their way in the 1990s trying to distance themselves from past activities. “There was an abandonment of each state’s core activities in trying to concentrate on advance technologies without looking back on what we were really good at,” he notes. “Our philosophy now is to build on our capabilities through resource technology. For example, the ICT focus has a huge amount of high performance computing and, while it is mineral research, most of it is done on computers so it’s very compatible.”

Technology parks and incubators are the important bridge between taking existing knowledge and markets and expanding them, by supporting new businesses that have the energy and agility to move industries to the next level. As well as retaining talent, Australia could become an intellectual attraction, turning what is now a scattering of commercial neighbourhoods into the start of a commercial nation.