KOTRA surveyed the status and success cases of 28 innovation clusters in 20 countries
Overwhelming two thirds of foreign innovative clusters pointed to a collaborative network as key to success
The innovation clusters in advanced countries are found to be putting various efforts to establish an industry-academia-research network and collaborative network between companies in the cluster.
On July 8, KOTRA published a report on the success cases of investment attraction and status of 28 foreign innovation clusters in 20 countries, aiming to step up efforts of domestic innovative clusters in attracting foreign investment.
Of 28 innovative clusters surveyed, 18 (64%) pointed out a collaboration network as key to success. In particular, an innovation cluster in London, U.K., known for Tech City, is where global ICT corporations such as Amazon, Intel, and Google are concentrated, along with DeepMind, a developer of AlphaGo. The strengths of Tech City lie not only in its solid ICT development infrastructure, but also in as active networking as 22,000 meet-ups between companies taking place in 2016 only. Through meet-ups, companies resolve difficult issues they face arising in the process of R&D and seek for win-win success.
Meanwhile, policies to attract innovative startups and technology professions are also on the rise. The U.K. introduced a new visa system in March this year, named as an innovator visa and start-up visa, to attract startups from abroad. Canada also endeavors to attract high-skilled workforce by streamlining visa issuance process for foreign skilled workers through “Global Skills Strategy“.
Head of KOTRA Invest KOREA Shawn Chang said, “The role of innovation cluster, in connection with region’s leading industries, is increasingly considered important for innovative growth,” adding that “Major innovative clusters in foreign countries are seeking for the growth of innovation ecosystem qualitatively and qualitatively by attracting foreign companies owning innovative technologies related with the 4th industrial revolution and by setting up collaboration network between companies.”
Source: Invest KOREA (July 8, 2019)