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OCR for page 41
Introduction
Mary Good
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
and STEP Board
Dr. Good welcomed the participants on behalf of the STEP Board and ex-
plained that the whole issue of state and regional initiatives has been of ongoing
interest of the board. "We have done a lot of work looking at innovation centers
around the world, and now we are looking at our own," she said. "It really has
been an extraordinary experience."
This particular initiative also has been very rewarding because the partners
have been able to move much faster than the normal pace, Dr. Good said. "That
has been an advantage in my view because we need to move innovation policy
quickly."
The successes of U.S. clusters such as Silicon Valley, Boston's Route 128,
and Research Triangle Park in creating industries and economic development have
generated global interest in clusters, Dr. Good noted. Now other governments are
promoting synergies between business, government, and research organizations
in their regions. Dr. Good said she finds it both interesting and problematic that
the rest of the world "is replicating our successes better than we are."
There are national cluster-development programs under way in Japan, South
Korea, and all of the nations of the European Union. Also, emerging economies
such as Brazil are quickening their pace of building clusters. Dr. Good noted that
China has a least 54 research parks, many of a very large scale. 2
In the United States, a number of state and local governments have sought
to stimulate economic development through regional clusters. The symposium,
therefore, will discuss what some of the states are doing. Such state and local
2See the presentation by Zhu Shen of BioForesight in National Research Council, Understanding
Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices, op. cit.
41
OCR for page 42
42 CLUSTERING FOR 21ST CENTURY PROSPERITY
efforts are important, Dr. Good said. Different parts of the country will have dif-
ferent kinds of clusters. "But we've got to have them all over," Dr. Good said.
"We can't just have them in special places."
The nanotechnology center being developed in Albany, New York, looks like
it will succeed, she said, and should be studied more closely. But in many cases,
the state and local entities don't have critical mass and don't have the sustained
policy support to move clusters forward. Term limits for local politicians also
make it difficult to achieve continuity for cluster-development efforts from ad-
ministration to administration. "One of them starts something and it dies in the
next round," she observed. Our observations indicate sustained innovation is a
marathon, not a sprint.
Most successful innovation clusters in the United States have drawn heavily
on nearby national laboratories and universities. Many state governors today have
decided their state universities will have to be part of the engines of innovation.
"So for those of us in universities, whether we like it or not, that is something
that is going to take a little getting used to," Dr. Good said. "I don't think we will
be able to get out from under that necessity."
Many people forget Silicon Valley's innovation cluster was a product of
multiple private industries interacting with major universities, Dr. Good said.
"If you were to take out the impact of Stanford and UC-Berkeley, Silicon Valley
would not exist. It is almost that simple." It also is important to remember that,
as a private university, Stanford could do what it wanted. "They didn't have to
ask permission," she said. "So we need to turn the state universities loose a little
bit to make this work."
Two panels in the symposium, Dr. Good noted, will discuss what universities
and leading national laboratories are doing to commercialize their research. If one
studies the record of national laboratories as a whole so far, "it has not been a big
success story," she said. "So how can we improve that over time?"
Dr. Good also noted that although the United States has had a strong record
of developing innovation clusters, "we have had no legislatively authorized pro-
gram to specifically, comprehensively support clusters. We have become hung up
on words. Everybody says that is industrial policy, we don't do that, and therefore
the initiatives die. Let's call it something else. I don't care. But let's get it moving
in one way or another."
There is evidence, however, that things are about to change, Dr. Good said. "I
believe the Obama Administration has undertaken a number of important initia-
tives focused on the development of clusters."
