Maturity Model of Tech-Parks based on Their Evolution; Where are Iran's parks?

Abstract

The conception of technology parks is employed with different meanings in scientific and practical categories, but the primary purpose of this is to create an Intermediate loop among the government, the Business and the university in order to act as a catalyst guiding the innovation. In this process, regarding internal and external effective factors, technology parks experienced various structural changes. One of these changes was change in innovation models, which parks need their assistance to perform their mission. Because of this, stakeholders, software and hardware infrastructures and also human factors changed. The goal of this study is to extract the maturity pattern of technology parks with centrality of innovation historical evolution. Determination of Iran’s parks position in maturity pattern of technology parks and their evolution extent after years of activity is another goal of this study. In this paper, in the beginning, the historical evolution of parks are evaluated. Then, the maturity pattern of technology parks are studied regarding sevenfold innovation generations as parks’ innovation viewpoint, which resulted to five generations of technology parks. Based on this, during interviews with managers and experts of technology parks, Iran parks’ position in maturity pattern of technology parks was determined which can be classified among first and second generations.

Keywords

• technology park
• science and technology park
• technopolis
• innovation region
• innovation generation
• maturity pattern