76 Policy Options and Practical Instruments

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•The park may be a not-for-profit or for-profit entity owned wholly or partially by a university or a university related entity. Alternatively, the park may be owned by a non-university entity but have a contractual or other formal relationship with a university, including joint or cooperative ventures between a privately developed research park and a university.

•Typically, science and technology parks serve the post-incubator phase of company development or provide a launch pad for companies that are "spun out" from a university or company.

•Science and technology parks are important agents in industry-science linkages. Thanks to their nature, they can facilitate both the establishment of business relationships fostering the diffusion of innovation and the formation of partnership relationships with industry.

•An innovation cluster is a system of close links between firms and their suppliers and clients, and knowledge institutions, resulting in the generation of innovation. The cluster includes companies that both cooperate and compete among themselves. The links between firms are both vertical, through buying and selling chains, and horizontal, through having complementary products and services, and use similar specialized inputs, technologies or institutions, and other linkages.

•Most of the linkages that shape a cluster involve social relationships or networks that produce benefits for the firms involved. Clusters become even more visible and attractive if they have strong linkages with related clusters in other regions and countries.

•Clusters are based on relationships among firms. The relationships can be built on common or complementary products, production processes, core technologies, natural resource requirements, skill requirements, and/or distribution channels.

•Cluster initiatives are organized efforts to increase the growth and competitiveness of clusters within a region, involving cluster firms, the government and/or the research community.

A. Innovation support institutions and firms’ innovation activities

The role of innovation support institutions

•Innovation support institutions are public, or private, or public-private institutions that provide support to start-up innovating entrepreneurs in commercializing their innovation and bringing it to the market.

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•Some institutions provide public financial and/or in-kind support to start-up ventures. However, this support is of one-off nature: at a certain point of time firms are expected to “grow up” and take care of themselves; those that fail to achieve financial viability within the established time limits will exit the market.

•All innovation support institutions provide (commercial or free) business services (such as couching, consulting, managerial or administrative services) to innovating entrepreneurs.

•Another important role of these institutions is in facilitating linkages between the potential key stakeholders of a project. They help in connectivity and networking both within the institution but also with the outside environment.

The system of innovation support institutions is very broad and may include various bodies

(see also Box 4.1.):26

•Awareness raising and public information institutions;

•Information brokerage institutions (technology forums, fairs, networking institutions, etc.);

•Management training and consulting centres, including centres for entrepreneurship

•Innovation intermediaries (technology transfer offices, information centres at universities, etc.);

•Couching centres and consulting offices;

•Business incubators and pre-incubators;

•Science parks and technological parks; and

•Innovation clusters.

26 Innovation support institutions also include different public and private funding agencies providing early stage financing to innovative firms. For policy options regarding these institutions see ECE/CECI/7.

78 Policy Options and Practical Instruments

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Box C4.1. Innovation support institutions in Poland

The institutional infrastructure supporting innovation in Poland includes universities, the Polish Academy of Sciences, other research and development units, supporting public bodies such as the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, the Industry Development Agency, the FIRE Innovation Centre, and a network of innovation support institutions. The number of such institutions has been growing steadily in recent years (see Chart below)

Chart. Number of innovation support centres in Poland, 1990-2007

In mid-2007, there were 694 innovation support centres in Poland:

•326 training and consulting centres

•87 technology-transfer and information centres

•49 pre-incubators

•84 local and regional guarantee funds

•64 credit funds

•6 seed capital funds

•47 entrepreneurship incubators

•16 technology incubators

•15 technology parks

•13 cluster initiatives.

This chapter provides some policy options for raising the efficiency of some of these innovation support institutions, namely those that are in the later chain aimed at supporting the bringing of innovations to the market. Three main types of innovation support institutions are discussed below: business incubators, science and technology parks and innovation clusters. While these institutions have many things in common, there are also distinct differences among them (Table 4.1). In reality, however, institutions often incorporate mixed features (e.g. incubators can have features of science or technology parks and vice versa).

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Table 4.1. Types of innovation support institutions

Source: Incubator Toolkit, iDISC - the infoDev Incubator Support Center (http://www.idisc.net/en/ToolkitPrint.aspx).