The Business Park

This chapter discusses the suburban, postindustrial, and holistically planned developments such as the Cambridge Science Park. These were initiated and managed by a single authority, usually a private developer, and hosted a mixture of offices, light industry, and private research centers. The chapter also highlights the emergence of the business park, which the author described as a host of different developments that at various times have been called “office parks,” “science parks,” “research parks,” “industrial parks,” or “technology parks.” The chapter then looks at the history of a new late-twentieth-century urban form, looking at the kinds of working subjects that this form hoped to produce and attract, and its relationship to the state and the wider world. Ultimately, the chapter traces back where the book began, at Trafford Park. Ruined by deindustrialization and choked by geography, Trafford Park was transformed by a state development corporation into a massive business park by the 1980s. As with the private housing estate and shopping mall, this new urban form required a reimagining of the old.

Mission statements: what university research parks tell us about timing

Purpose Mission statements are a key element of any organization. Ideally, the mission statement should be written at the initial stages of an organization’s life to be a useful tool to guide future organization’s decisions and strategy. However, at the early stages of an organization’s life, the organization might still be under development with the objective and stakeholders not yet well-defined, and therefore, stating the mission so early on, might neglect some important elements. In this paper, the authors explore the difference in mission statement quality between missions that have been created at the birth stage of an organization versus missions that are just explicitly formulated once the organization is already well-established and an underlying implicit mission already exists. The authors use as an empirical setting university research parks. Design/methodology/approach The authors evaluate mission statement quality using content analysis. The authors then test the differences on mission statement quality between two groups of research parks, those that have followed a creation strategy versus those that have followed a formulation strategy, using mean of differences test. Findings The authors find that a formulation strategy produces more complete mission statements than the creation strategy. Research parks that have followed a formulation strategy include in their mission statements more references to relevant stakeholders, such as investors, than parks following a creation strategy with respect to their mission statement. Research limitations/implications The research setting is Spanish Science Parks. This research setting is appropriate to answer the research question, as two Park creation strategies, planned and unplanned, allow the researchers to clearly differentiate between two mission conception strategies. However, the sample size is rather small. Practical implications Research has shown that a well-defined mission helps organizations focus and strategy formulation. The authors’ research offers some guidance on how to achieve a high-quality mission statement which will, in turn, help organizations have a better definition of their purpose. Originality/value Research until now has assumed that the mission statement should be formulated at the initial stages of the organization’s life. The authors’ research shows that defining the mission statement later in the process creates higher-quality mission statements that better reflect the organizations purpose and relevant stakeholders.

The Rise of Anchor Institutions and the Threat to Community Health: Protecting Community Wealth, Building Community Power

Academic institutions are increasingly playing pivotal roles in economic development and community redevelopment in cities around the United States. Many are functioning in the role of anchor institutions and building technology, biotechnology, or research parks to facilitate biomedical research. In the process, universities often partner with local governments, implementing policies that displace entire communities and families, thereby inducing a type of trauma that researcher Mindy Thompson Fullilove has termed “root shock.” We argue that displacement is a threat to public health and explore the ethical implications of university-led displacement on public health research, especially the inclusion of vulnerable populations into health-related research. We further explicate how the legal system has sanctioned the exercise of eminent domain by private entities such as universities and developers.Strategies that communities have employed in order to counter such threats are highlighted and recommended for communities that may be under the threat of university-led displacement. We also offer a critical look at the three dominant assumptions underlying university-sponsored development: that research parks are engines of economic development, that deconcentrating poverty via displacement is effective, and that poverty is simply the lack of economic or financial means. Understanding these fallacies will help communities under the threat of university-sponsored displacement to protect community wealth, build power, and improve health.

The Spread of Market Logic

The preceding three chapters showed how changes in the policy environment, driven by a newfound political concern with innovation, allowed specific market-oriented practices to grow and spread across universities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter examines how the market logic embodied in those practices became increasingly influential throughout academic science during the 1980s. The success of biotech entrepreneurship, university patenting, and university-industry research centers encouraged additional experiments with and expansions of market-logic activity, only some of which were successful. The 1980s also saw a new wave of expansion of older market-oriented activities, like research parks, that had stagnated during the 1970s.

Building a Place for Innovation

This article elaborates benefits of building technology or research parks for innovations. Governments and universities around the world are turning to research parks due to their ability to revitalize local economies. They are betting that shared parking lots, open offices, restaurants, bars, parties, and activities will make it easier for people to mix, mingle, and strike creative sparks. Research parks resist recessions longer and recover faster. As governments and corporations hope to use science park development to spur economic growth, it is important to understand factors that make these research parks successful. Governments see science parks to move up the economic food chain. Most experts, who have studied science parks, agree on the need for business leadership, civic support, and strong university links. Singapore is using education and science parks to shift its economy to software, advanced materials, and biomedical products. It recruited top scholars for its schools and offers 1000 free Ph.D. scholarships to students who promise to work in Singapore for 10 years.