Since the 1970s the number of developments labelled as innovation intense environments has increased at an exponential rate. Innovation intense environments are defined here as those spaces that are purported to accelerate the rate of innovation and the proliferation of high technology industries. A number of academic fields now study existing innovation intense environments like Silicon Valley, in order to explain how they are constituted and how they can be replicated.Over the years a wide variety of model innovation intense environments has been proposed including: science park, technopolis, information city, milieu, industry cluster and regional innovation system. These different models are compared and analysed in terms of their portrayal of appropriate form, core innovation dynamics and policy recommendations. The discussion of models is then placed within the post-war history of the most famous innovation intense environment-Silicon Valley. It is concluded that such models must be well grounded within a specific historic and cultural context in order to function as useful analytic tools.
The drive by governments to find new means of managing technological change in the quest for competitive advantage has led to an expansion in the international construction of high technology incubators for the purpose of accelerating innovation rates. In 1987 the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) asked the Australian government to jointly build in Australia a ‘city of the future’ known as the Multifunction Polis (MFP) which would incubate high technology industries for the twenty-first century. An analysis of the curious course of MFP design negotiations sheds light on a number of important issues including cultural differences in constructing solutions to national innovation problems and the use of the promise of innovation in shaping international relations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.