Lost in translation? Building science and innovation city strategies in Australia and the UK.

The Pacific Innovation Corridor has been an initiative of a local government body, although it articulates with State Government strategy. Given that the Gold Coast City Council can only be a facilitator and coordinator of local economic development, its limitations in achieving tangible effects must be acknowledged and this has been recognised by the Council itself in its Economic Development Strategy:

From the available evidence it cannot be concluded that there has been a shift towards a more innovation-focused knowledge-based economy in Queensland, even at State level. While Queensland has experienced high levels of economic growth and significant improvements in employment since the late-1990s, this is due to the resources boom. The Smart State and Gold Coast City Council initiatives, including the Pacific Innovation Corridor, may have resulted from increased government engagement (at State and local body levels) with innovation and the notion of a knowledge-based economy, and they have certainly improved the science, technology and knowledge infrastructure in the State. However, these gains remain largely in the public sector and the initiatives have yet to realise their aim of creating an 'economy in which innovation and ideas drive new jobs and drive new and better ways of doing business'.

DISCUSSION

In terms of the localities concerned, these could not be two more contrasting examples: one being a concerted attempt to achieve regeneration in a city with a long since decayed 'rust belt' industrial economy that was once part of the cradle of the industrial revolution, and the other a set of interventions to foster economic diversification in a sub-tropical coastal city and region dominated by tourism and retirement in the 'new world'.

Policies for their regeneration or further development show marked similarities, however. In the rhetoric of both initiatives, and embodied to a greater or lesser extent in more material actions of the initiators, can be seen a very similar set of elements. These include: policy and action from different levels of government which is locally-focused and aimed at economic, social and even cultural transformation; the invocation of the importance of the 'new knowledge economy', both nationally and locally with innovation as its driving force; the centrality of the university as a creator and disseminator of usable knowledge that will become the wellspring of innovation; knowledge flows from centres of creation (notably the laboratory) to centres of commercial exploitation (notably university spin-offs); the geographical proximity of a designated area or space as a basis for the clustering of different types of economic actor; the building of linkages and relationships within these spaces as channels for the flow of knowledge and other economic resources; and, above all, the expectation of a snowballing effect whereby the space becomes attractive, or more attractive, to key economic actors in the knowledge economy--entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other investors, 'high technology' firms, and knowledge workers with the requisite skills.

In these new 'science cities' we see the same kind of discourse that characterised the promotion of 'high technology' as an economic saviour and its centres of insemination and gestation, 'technology parks', in the 1980s (Macdonald 1987). The central question for us, then, is how the credibility of the political rhetoric associated with a now standard package of public policy and action programmes, which are expected to lead effectively and eventually to economically-vibrant spaces occupied by clusters based around networked knowledge flows and knowledge commercialisation, can be maintained in the light of so little success?

We started to address this question by observing that the initiatives appear to embody the 'triple helix' model of university-industry-government relations (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 1997) as the basis for economic development. The interventions discussed articulate the three basic elements of the model: the more prominent role for universities in innovation, collaboration among universities, industries and governments, and the taking on of additional roles. The approach implied in the model has been enthusiastically pursued by some university players. At Newcastle University, for instance, the cultural change required for the University to embrace the Science City initiative has been construed in terms of a shift of research orientation to 'Pasteur's Quadrant' characterised as use-inspired basic research, ('... basic research that seeks to extend the frontiers of understanding but is also inspired by considerations of use' [Stokes 1997: 74]). But this model is but a description of an intended outcome, an observable, or at least potentially observable, state of affairs. We are more interested in how this state of affairs might be being achieved, i.e. in the processes which involve 'iterations, movements to and fro, negotiations and compromises of all sorts', to draw on Callon et al. (1992: 215), and through which this configuration of institutional actors might be being created, stabilised and sustained.

Central to the evolution of both examples has been a complex set of interactions across multiple levels of governance where different governments, at scales from the local, regional, state and national (and even at times international in the form of the EU in the case of Newcastle), are seeking to work with partners from the universities and private sector in constructing new forms of local advantage. The success of a locality in developing a coherent policy depends on the extent to which the competition between jurisdictions can be overcome by the opportunity of mutual benefit--can one or more partners design a 'project' that can meet the needs of all, in a way in which all can clearly see benefits?

These localised initiatives are clearly a consequence of the particular histories and processes of construction and representation in their respective places. As with science parks, there may be templates and exemplars that are promoted by policymakers, academics and consultants but specific local configurations of institutions and governance relations lead to different outcomes. Grand models may be proposed at early stages of development but they may not survive the negotiation between different levels of government and their conflicting aims and priorities. Understanding the form these initiatives take requires an understanding of the process of their construction.

The 'triple helix' form of analysis provides us with a framework in which the rhetoric of local coalitions can be ordered and made more convincing. The strength of the framework is, however, also its weakness. By offering a powerful metaphor for collaboration, the triple helix becomes the rhetoric, and offers a normative model into which actual initiatives can be shoehorned. So, rather than helping to explain or account for the process of constructing local initiatives, the triple helix framework and other similar rhetorics merely describe an idealised version of the intended outcome. If we examine the terrain on which all this occurs more carefully, we find the realities of multi-level governance and the tensions, contradictions and opportunities that this may entail. Our case studies have shown that it is the combination of a willingness at multiple levels of governance to reach common purpose around the vision that matters, rather than the simple repetition of the standard models of science-based development. Translating the ideal model into practice in different contexts will produce different outcomes, but the hard work of negotiation should not be neglected.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We wish to thank Richard Badham of Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Michael Zanko of the School of Management & Marketing, Wollongong University, and Paul Benneworth and Felicity Wray, both of KITE, Newcastle University for their thoughts and discussions around some of the issues addressed in this paper.

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