This is the first article in a two-part series looking into high-tech innovation districts and similar clusters.
Beyond Silicon Valley
Everywhere wants to be the next Silicon Valley, a rich concentration of advanced technology enterprises, entrepreneurs and world-class universities and researchers, attracting global talent and investment, quality jobs and high-growth industries.
Think again. Experienced policy analyst, John H. Howard, scrutinises these much-lauded technology-led innovation places and finds flaws in what he calls their “rhetorical technology visions”. They are more about passion and persuasion, than data and facts.
Howard marshals the research showing that while these innovation districts are epicentres of collaboration, creativity and technology leadership, they are not proving universally beneficial. Innovation districts offer little explicitly to the general population, particularly those bearing the brunt of economic transformations.
Innovation districts can displace minority groups, being breeding grounds for inequality and gentrification. They disproportionately represent the interests of ‘power elites’, such as property developers, urban renewal agencies, research think tanks, politicians and the media.
They are focused on commercial incentives and economic returns, not social needs or community-wide aspirations. Consequently, these high-tech innovation districts have downsides relating to equity, inclusivity, sustainability and social cohesion.
Other commentators go further to question whether Silicon Valley is a hub of creativity any longer, as it has become homogenised as a “self-segregated business park monoculture”, according to Tom Foremski, publisher of Silicon Valley Watcher.
Foremski contends that Silicon Valley has lost its edge, a place for scaling businesses but not for original novel ideas. Insulated from everyday struggles, Silicon Valley creatives experience an essentially frictionless and predictable living. Little adversity or diversity diminishes Silicon Valley’s role as a massive innovation incubator of new, useful ideas skillfully executed for impact.
Saving innovation districts
The answer is not to scrap technology-led innovation places, but to expand their remit to advance community and social wellbeing, and environmental sustainability, as well as their foundation aims of boosting place-based economic development.
How to help high-tech innovation districts to make this shift? The broad disciplines of innovation management provide valuable insights, together with civic innovation initiatives that foster people-led change in local communities.
In essence, rather than quarantining economic development from community development, the opportunities for linking initiatives in both areas and multiplying their joint impact should be explored and implemented.
The findings of the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer illustrate how the interplay of social and economic considerations affects community acceptance of innovation as a driver of future prosperity.
It shows Australians—across income, gender and age– as particularly sceptical about the communication, management and impacts of innovation. No institution reached the trust threshold, and the media were definitely distrusted. Australians are also highly likely to feel society is changing too quickly and not in ways that “benefit people like me”.
High-tech innovation districts, therefore, need to make a persuasive and authentic case on how innovation activities improve the lives of ordinary individuals, families and communities, and identify ways they can gain more control over their future.
Deliberate attention is needed to examine the social and community impacts of planned economic development initiatives, particularly from the perspective of the lived experience of local people.
The headline message from John H. Howard’s commentary is the complex interplay of vision, power, and governance in innovation districts, precincts and hubs results in a social downside. The reality of these innovation districts fails to match the rhetoric.
Action to redress this deficiency in high-tech innovation districts is the subject of the second article in this two-part series.
REFERENCES:
Howard, J.H. (2024), Rhetoric and Reality in Technology Visions, Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, https://www.actoninstitute.au/post/rhetoric-and-reality-in-technology-visions
Foremski, T. (2016) Silicon Valley gets on the same bus everyday—innovation needs diversity, LinkedIn Pulse, 15 January 2016
2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, (2024) Innovation in Peril, https://www.edelman.com.au/trust/2024/trust-barometer
24th May 2024
The Kennedy Company 