The role of regional contextual factors for science and technology parks: a conceptual framework

ABSTRACT

Literature on science and technology parks (STPs) lacks a systematic understanding of how regional contextual factors affect the performance of STPs. Most studies focus on park-internal factors and neglect the regional context and connections when evaluating STPs’ performance. This paper provides new insight on the role of regional factors for STPs by combining and discussing existing studies on STP performance with literature on regional innovation systems. We conduct an exploratory, systematic literature review of 64 papers that refer to park-external factors in their studies of STP performance. We identify five regional factors (university and research institutes, industrial structure, institutional settings, financial support and urbanization) and assess how these factors have been shown to play a role for STP performance in previous studies. Based on this review, the paper develops a comprehensive framework of how regional contextual factors influence the performance of STPs, which can be used in designing and/or improving STP-performance while taking regional characteristics and needs into consideration. We believe a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of these regional connections can help improve designs of STPs, and thereby their performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Science and technology parks
• regional context
• systematic literature review
• regional innovation systems
• Multiscalar STI policy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Alberto Albahari for advice and Michaela Trippl, for her comments on an earlier version of this paper at the International PhD course on Economic Geography in Utrecht, 2018. The constructive comments from the anonymous reviewer on an earlier version of this paper were also most useful. The authors are listed alphabetically. All errors and shortcomings are of course our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Amonpat Poonjan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0657-5409

Anne Nygaard Tanner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3145-908X

Notes

1 Terms such as science park, research park, technology park, science and technology park, business park, innovation centre and technopoles are used interchangeably across the world — in Asia and continental Europe, the term ‘Science parks’ is more commonly used, in the USA and UK it is more common to use ‘Research parks’ and in Latin America ‘Technology park’ is a more commonly used term. In this paper we use the term STP to cover all the above variations.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Royal Thai government scholarship.