Anthony M. Townsend

It went really well. Here’s the 5 minute statement I made:

Anthony Townsend Senate Committe Testimony (Part I) from agreatnotion on Vimeo.

And here’s my response to one of Senator Pryor’s questions:

Anthony Townsend Senate Committe Testimony (Part I) from agreatnotion on Vimeo.

Here is a copy of my testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on “Research Parks and Job Creation” today.

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Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of this Committee for the opportunity to share my expertise. America’s science parks are essential infrastructure for the nation’s future competitiveness.

I have spent the last 15 years studying technology and economic development. I hold a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from MIT, and have taught courses at New York University. Currently, I work as a technology forecaster for the Institute for the Future, an independent think tank established in Silicon Valley in 1968.

I have spent the last three years working with science park managers and developers in the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Today I will discuss the science park model, its advantages and disadvantages, and most importantly its future prospects.

It’s an appropriate time to consider the science park model, because this year is the 50th anniversary of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park  – the nation’s largest, oldest, and most successful science park. Like many parks today, RTP has had great success. But RTP also faces potential threats to that success in the future. The business model that worked in 1959 won’t work for new parks in 2009. Established parks like RTP need to evolve too.

Three years ago, when RTP looked to the future, it established a partnership with our organization to develop a broad long-range forecast of the future of science parks. Looking 20 years out, we engaged over 50 experts from a dozen nations. We detailed 14 global trends that will shape the future for science parks, and developed three scenarios to explore how parks might navigate a volatile and uncertain future.

In the best-case scenario, the science park model gets an upgrade – in part by building stronger ties to universities and new online science networks.

In the worst case scenario, the traditional business model – which depends heavily upon big companies as anchor tenants – simply disappears as those companies cut back on research and development and aggressively virtualize and offshore what’s left.

In the third scenario, a new more decentralized science park models emerges to challenge the status quo. By using digital networks to tightly link many small spaces into clusters, what we call “research clouds” would form around universities and directly compete with parks, especially for small companies.

The most important result from our scenarios is that none of them forecast a world where lots of new science parks succeed based on the traditional real estate-driven model of development we’ve known for the last 60 years.

I know you are concerned about creating jobs quickly, as well as creating long-term capacity for innovation and growth. However, rather than encouraging the development of new science parks, we should consider focusing instead on re-inventing the parks we already have.

There are three key priorities to consider:

First, to create jobs immediately, we should invest in upgrading science park “hardware”. Convert vacant single-tenant buildings to multi-tenant for young companies. Support green retrofits, which creates green-collar jobs. Fund shared infrastructure like large scientific instruments that create unique value for a park.

Second, invest in upgrading science park “software”. Science parks need to evolve from managing dirt to managing activities that support innovation. The best chance for rapid job creation over the next year or two is the groundswell of entrepreneurship happening right now in this country. But parks need to beef up their capacity to engage and nurture small companies, which is a very different thing than attracting and retaining large ones. Grants that support expanded missions for science park managers will greatly enhance their effectiveness as economic developers.

Finally, we should recognize that science parks are part of knowledge ecosystems – networks of people, organizations and ideas – that operate at a regional scale. We can’t just build science parks in isolation and expect them to succeed. One key reason why the Research Triangle Park has been so successful is that it had a strong regional partnership at its core. Early on, that partnership developed what CEO Rick Weddle calls “the grand vision”. It was that vision, handed down from generation to generation that allowed the project to stay on track during transitions in political leadership. Science park funding, such as that proposed in S.583 needs to be tied to regional economic programs, such as those proposed in S.777.

Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, again for this opportunity, and I welcome any questions or comments you may have.

Wow, my dissertation will live on the Internet as long as MIT does

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/30041

This is a pretty good overview of the ideas behind the Breakout festival which starts next week!

Few posts, but I’m busy and updating Twitter a lot. I’ve also recently been playing with Switchabit so the updates should flow more easily across these different sites.

A video of my talk on the future of science parks forecast on May 8 in Spain has just been posted to the site of ESPAITEC, the science park in Castellon where the event took place.

The Research Triangle Foundation has posted video of my presentation of our forecast on the future of science parks and technology regions. (Report – Prezi overview)

I was on this panel in March – the video is here now. I think I said some smart things.

This article appeared recently in ED Now, the newsletter of the International Economic Development Council.

Download PDF: Regional Knowledge Ecosystems: Laying the Groundwork for Future Technology-Based Economic Development

This was published recently, and blogged about over on Richard Florida’s Creative Cities blog. 

PDF (1.8 Mb)