Creating Regional Wealth in the Innovation Economy: Models, Perspectives, and Best Practices

   

Linking Science Parks and University Education ” A Governmental Prerequisite

Kista Science Park did not originally develop around a leading university. Already in the 1980s, large corporations in Kista needed more competent people and more quality research than the region could offer. Discussions were held between Sweden's leading technical university KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), [7] the state government, the Swedish Board of Technical Development, Ericsson, Asea, and the city of Stockholm. The consortium decided to set up the Electrum Foundation [8] to enable a greater proximity between people from industry, research, and education. Based on the concept of networks of people rather than networks of organizations, local industry, research, and education professionals were all given the opportunity to work and meet in the same building, to get to know the others' problems and thus to build a basis for cooperation. Since 2000, Electrum has been regularly publishing a competence newspaper. It is working to install non-scientific education subjects in Kista, convinced that the region also needs people using the right, not only the left, part of the brain.

Peter Kopelman

A breeding ground for acquisition targets

There was always an entrepreneurial spirit in Swedish firms. As soon as sufficient capital became accessible in the region, people started to jump ship from large corporations like Ericsson to start their own companies. Releasing the Swedish potential that lay subdued for a long time has created a surge of innovation and the spawning of many new companies. Hence the new concept of a breeding ground. The Swedish government has been very pro-ICT, which has helped the process a lot. They made sure that all infrastructure- related questions were properly taken care of so that things could really get going.

Cisco came to Sweden to identify and acquire innovative companies that it believes will have an impact on its future markets. One of the reasons Cisco is so interested in Sweden is that at the same time, there is a flavor of the U.S. culture, a flavor of the European culture, and a flavor of our own company culture around here. Due to the country's widely dispersed demographics and the excellent information infrastructure, there has been a lot of experimentation with new forms of "virtual" company organization that interest us very much.

Cultural fit

When searching for companies to acquire, we primarily look for a cultural fit with the potential candidate. Since Sweden has traditionally been so dependent on exports, the Swedish business culture is open to foreign practices and can be easily integrated within a larger corporate structure. The Swedish cultural flexibility works well with Cisco's business culture: We adapt our products to the rest of the world, not the other way around.

The crisis benefits the breeding ground

Through its acquisitions in Sweden, Cisco aims to stay at the forefront of technological development, enabling it to catch on to new growth cycles faster than through internal development. The technology crisis, which I consider a necessary cleansing of the market, has struck Sweden especially hard. When companies die, there is new "soil" for the breeding ground, enabling the emergence of new kinds of companies. This kind of development can be seen with the Swedish Internet consulting companies that shot up like rockets and then crashed faster than anyone else. The Swedish entrepreneurs who have founded and run these companies are true pioneers. Even if their companies may not survive the crisis in the market, they have learned a lot in the process. Today, Swedish entrepreneurs know better than most other people at least what doesn't work. This is a competitive advantage enabling innovative Swedish companies to be faster at producing new and improved value propositions .

Even though Sweden has one of the most literate and well- educated populations in the world (see the International Comparisons table on page 110), the country's shortage of skills increased as more and more innovative companies moved to the region. [9] Today, the Swedish government demands that each science park, in order to be acknowledged as one, needs to include a university or at least part of a university with its own campus to produce new generations of qualified graduates.

In 1999, KTH founded IT University Kista, [10] which in 2000 employed 30 full-time professors, 300 researchers, and educated 3,500 students. A new campus is planned for 2003, enabling the university to double its student body to 7,000 by 2005. IT University Kista is a tenant on the premises of the Electrum Foundation and has become a part of the Electrum competence network. Its curriculum is coauthored by educational and industrial individuals. The university aims to be problem focused, rather than theoretical, interacting with the issues facing Kista's high-tech companies.

The competencies built by such government initiatives complement the Swedish people's traditional skills at operating in global markets, based on a business culture of "global compatibility" and a far- ranging know-how of how to set up and operate global businesses.

   
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