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Recommendation 3
Establishment of the Science and Technology
Parks should be encouraged with activities to
promote networking between their tenants.
Recommendation 4
Industrial clusters should be encouraged to move
to internationalization so that they develop an
outward exporting orientation and link up with
international systems of innovation.
Recommendation 5
Universities should boost their incubation
centers to provide more support to researchers
to commercialize their application oriented
research results though the creation of new
spin-off enterprises.
Recommendation 6
Universities in WBC region should establish
Technology Transfer Centers to handle property
rights issues and the licensing of inventions
and innovations created in university
laboratories and to encourage patenting and
licensing of technologies to enterprises.
Recommendation 7
Universities should focus on applied research
activities. A record of collaboration with
enterprises and participation in joint research
projects should be included in academic staff
promotion criteria.
6.4 Future steps
To improve WBC’s innovative capacity in
particular, more resources for science and R&D will
not be enough. The focus needs to shift to:
• The microeconomic capacity of WB region;
• Quality and specialization of factor
conditions;
• Sophistication of demand;
• Quality of enterprise strategies and
entrepreneurship;
• Presence and depth of clusters.
These are the qualities of the business
environment that enable the transformation
of scientific knowledge into new products,
services and competitive firms.
Universities in the WBCs should be important
elements of their local systems of innovation:
• Driver of regional technology-based
development and the source of a major
proportion of local innovations and
local companies;
• A good contributor to local knowledge and to
the development of local technology clusters;
• A major source of knowledge in emerging
and established clusters.
As an important future step need to be
involvement of proposed WBC model
of university-enterprise cooperation in
corresponding strategic documents such
as Regional Development Plans or Scientific
and Technological development Strategies
or university memoranda, etc. Innovation
policy should be seen as the cumulative
result of interaction among governments at
various levels, businesspersons, academics,
and social partners comprising membership
from all of these spheres, especially at the
regional level.
Furthermore, it is necessary to establish new
institutional arrangements of university–
enterprise–government relations. Next step
will be generating a knowledge infrastructure
in terms of overlapping institutional spheres
with hybrid organizations emerging at the
interfaces as can be seen in Figure 5.
In order to realize full capacities of knowledge
triangle in the near future, WBCs should attain
some form of model presented in Figure 5, known
as a triple helix model. The common objective is
to realize an innovative environment consisting
of university spin-off firms, tri-lateral initiatives
for knowledge-based economic development, and
strategic alliances among firms (large and small,
operating in different areas, and with different
levels of technology), government laboratories,
and academic research groups.