High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas 1988-2012
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Sustaining The Technopolis: High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas 1988-2012 By: David V. Gibson and John Sibley Butler Date: February 2013 Abstract: Update and elaboration of the 1988 Journal of Business Venturing article "Creating the Technopolis: High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas" which emphasized the role of key influencers, institutions and networks that made possible Austin’s extraordinary technology-based growth. Elaborates the "Technopolis Wheel" framework to better reflect challenges and opportunities as well as review lessons learned during the past 25 years. While new aspects have emerged an unchanging, fundamental reality is that the "magic" of the Austin Model continues to be based on 1st- and 2nd-level influencers — key leaders and visionaries from academia, business, and government networking and working together to achieve targeted objectives. Keywords: Austin, Texas; technopolis; regional economic development; entrepreneurship; innovation; networking IC! Institute Working Paper WP-2013-02-01 © IC! Institute, The University of Texas at Austin http://ic2.utexas.edu Sustaining The Technopolis: High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas 1988-20121 IC² Institute Working Paper Series WP2013-02-01 By David V. Gibson* Associate Director, IC2 Institute The University of Texas at Austin Ph: 512-475-8941 [email protected] and John S. Butler Director, IC² Institute, The University of Texas at Austin Ph 512-471-4788 [email protected],edu Keywords: Technopolis, Regional Development, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Networking • Corresponding Author 1 The authors would like to thank the following for reviewing and otherwise contributing to this research paper: Jim Butler, Manager, Creative Industries, City of Austin; Beverly Kerr, VP Research, Austin Chamber of Commerce; Betsy Merrick, Associate Director, Marketing/Public Relations, Office of Technology Commercialization, UT Austin; and Susan Wyatt Sedwick, Associate Vice President for Research and Director, Office of Sponsored Projects, UT Austin.; James Jarrett, Senior Research Scientist, IC² Institute; Robert Peterson, Associate VP for Research; Margaret Cotrofeld, Research Assistant and Technical Writer, IC² Institute, The University of Texas at Austin. Sustaining The Technopolis: High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas 1988-2012 ABSTRACT This paper is an update and elaboration of the 1988 Journal of Business Venturing article on “Creating the Technopolis: High-Technology Development in Austin, Texas” which emphasized the role of key influencers, institutions and networks that made possible Austin’s extraordinary technology-based growth. We elaborate the “Technopolis Wheel” framework to better reflect challenges and opportunities as well as review lessons learned during the past 25 years. While new aspects have emerged an unchanging, fundamental reality is that the “magic” of the Austin Model continues to be based on 1st and 2nd level influencers—key leaders and visionaries from academia, business, and government networking and working together to achieve targeted objectives. 1. Introduction The rapid and dynamic growth of the high-technology sector during the final decades of the twentieth century ushered in new approaches to regional economic development worldwide. One approach has been exemplified in the term “technopolis” in which economic development is stimulated by fostering R&D and technology commercialization through public-private collaboration (Tatsuno, 1988; Morita and Hiraoka, 1988; Onda, 1988).2 Overtime greater emphasis has been placed on the importance of collaboration across business, academia, and government at the regional level (Smilor et.al. 1988a; Gibson et.al., 1992; Rogalev, 1998; Florida, 2002; Nishizawa and Fukushima, 2005;; Nishizawa, 2011) as more recently popularized in ‘The Triple Helix’ (Viale and Etzkowitz, 2010). In short, the modern technopolis interactively links public and private sectors for technology innovation and commercialization at the regional level to spur economic development and to promote economic diversification. The present paper is informed by the conceptual framework of the Technopolis Wheel, first published in 1988, in modeling the interplay of high-technology development and regional economic growth in conjunction with seven key segments: The research university; large and start-up technology firms; federal, state, and local government; and support groups (e.g., 3 chamber of commerce, venture and angel capital, IP lawyers and other business professionals). 2 “Techno” emphasizes the importance of technology and “polis” is Greek for city-state and emphasizes the balance between the public and private sectors. In 1980 the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) announced the technopolis concept and in 1983 the Technopolis Law laid out 20-year development plans for the development of regional research centers in 28 Japanese cities. The long-term plan was to build a Japanese Technostate composed of research centers and technology-based regions throughout Japan. (S. Tatsuno, “Building a Japanese Technostate: MITI’s Technopolis Program,” in Creating The Technopolis, (Eds.) Smilor, Kozmetsky, and Gibson (1988c), pp 3-21). This ambitious national effort was motivated, in part, by the established success of California’s Silicon Valley. However, Japan’s Technopolis Strategy failed to produce the desired results (Nishizawa, 2011; Fukushima, 2011). 3 “Creating The Technopolis: High Technology Development in Austin, Texas.” Smilor, Gibson, Kozmetsky, Journal of Business Venturing, 4:49-67 (1988b). 1 On the one hand, key characteristics of the Technopolis Wheel have not changed for Austin, Texas over the past 25 years. On the other hand, new emphases and aspects need to be considered as we progress into the 21st Century, figure 1. In the end, we argue for the enduring value of the Technopolis Wheel as a useful conceptual framework for studying assets and challenges for accelerating regional technology-based development. FIGURE 1. The Technopolis Wheel Framework Emphasizing the Importance of Influencers 1.2 Industry Clusters and Innovation Ecosystems Research on the importance of technology-based industry clusters located in key geographic areas has been the subject of much scholarship including Castells 1985, 1991, 2001; Porter, 1990; Saxenian 1994; Folta, Cooper, and Baik, 2005; McCann and Folta, 2011, and Gilbert, McDougall and Audritsch, 2007. Along with the growth of high-technology regions came the debate about the future of cities (Kotkin 2000) including how the rise of information technology and the Internet would free workers from the constraints of space and time. However, the increasing importance of specific technology regions worldwide has largely debunked the notion of the imminent decline of regional importance (Castells 2001). Instead, specific geographic locations have become even more important to successful innovation and technology development (Kotkin 2000; Gibson and Rogers, 1994; Butler and Gibson, 2011). The importance of better understanding the importance of Industry clusters can be traced to Alfred Marshall, who noted that industries tend to cluster in distinct geographic districts that tend to specialize in the production of narrowly related goods (Marshall, 1920). Marshall believed that knowledge spillovers are the cause (or result) of this clustering. Schumpeter (1934) continued down this theoretical path when he noted that innovative breakthroughs tend to distribute themselves irregularly over time in specialized clusters of activity. Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) elaborated that the development of industry 2 clusters is key to a globally successful and competitive regional strategy (Moore, 1996). As noted by James Moore in 1993: To extend a systematic approach to strategy, I suggest that a company be viewed not as a member of a single industry but as part of a business ecosystem that crosses a variety of businesses. In a business ecosystem, companies co-evolve capabilities around a new innovation, they work cooperatively and competitively to support new products, satisfy customer needs, and eventually incorporate the next round of innovations (The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems, 1993:76). In research on the interrelations of organizational structures the paradox of competition and cooperation comes to the fore with the belief that regionally-based public and private organizations can be simultaneously highly competitive and cooperative in networking across different community organizations and institutions (Ouchi 1984; Smilor 1988a). Smilor, Gibson, and Kozmetsky (1988b) introduced the framework of the Technopolis Wheel to emphasize the key role of first and second level influencers in networking across and leveraging assets of public and private sectors in the creation of jobs and wealth. High-tech giant Silicon Valley was perhaps the first region to embody the cooperation- competition paradox in a flexible industrial system embedded in networks rather than single firms located in hierarchical, vertical institutional environments (Saxenian 1994). The premise being that a network of institutional alliances yields greater technological development and innovation, which accelerates regional development (Smilor and Wakelin 1990). Kozmetsky (1993) reinforced the concept of the region or community in the cluster discussion by focusing on the firm as one unit of analysis