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December 29, 2005
When I drive past Flinders University from Adelaide to Victor Harbor I pass by a group of buildings called a technology park; this is a place where academic science and industry meet and collborate to form the drivers of the newly forming knowledge economy. Does anything happen there I wonder? I doubted it.
Technology park was modelled on Silicon Valley. It tries to emulate it so as to transform South Australia from a rustbelt to a knowledge economy state. That transformation through incubation was designed to solve the crisis that had occured when the set of ideas associated with industrialization ran up against a social reality that it could not explain --the failure of industralization and manufacturing to provide fo rthe state's economic growth during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Technology Park stood for the way that South Australia was going to become high tech--remember all that talk about the clever cocuntry?
Well nothing much has happened because SA is still low tech with little IT or biotechnology industries. Similarly for Australia in general, despite all the talk about bio-tech start ups spinning off from publicly finded research in public universities.
So what went wrong? A clue is provided by this interesting review by Jane Marceau of Margaret Pugh O'Mara's Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. In this kind of economic policy about the knowledge economy:
"...it is held that science will kick start new industries and refashion older ones. On this account economies based on steel and 'rust belt' industry will be replaced by IT and biotechnology as the 'clean' and 'knowledge-based' engines that will drive both economies and societies."
Hence all the attempts to set up baby Silicon valleys in the different states around Australia. Marceau says that Cities of Knowledge gets below the spin currently spread by Australia's politicians and universities that they are pioneers in university-industry engagement. What then is disclosed.
Marceau says that O'Mara's text:
"...shows that higher education institutions and their science alone will not automatically produce the wealth, the spatial patterns, and the industrial technologies associated with the Silicon Valley holy grail. Universities and cities might build technology parks and link laboratories to companies and scientists to market forces, but success is not guaranteed. That alone is a useful lesson for us. But the book does more---it links iconic local geographical, research, and industrial development patterns firmly to the defence policies of Washington's Cold War. It also shows how local differences in the relative power of the players and the socio-economic circumstances of city locations have shaped how cities of knowledge do or don’t develop."
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Washington DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia are having their economies maintained at the moment by federal defence spending. The Dulles high-tech corridor is dependant on federal defence funds.
There is the Janelli (IIRC) technology park nearby too. It is all underground, mostly bio-tech. But again I would not be surprised if most of their labor force requires security clearances. It seems the way of the local labor market.
That being said, it is only government that can provide the sustained dollars and budget to help R&D along. Because it is military spending the flow of those dollars can also go domestically without the WTO getting involved. It is part of the reason why I believe Australia should increase its defence R&D funding and primary weapon systems development.