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A recent paper of Regional Studies “Revisiting the Silicon Island? The Geographically Varied ‘Strategic Coupling’ in the Development of High-technology Parks in Taiwan’ explores the dynamics of three technology parks in Taiwan and their role in triggering respective technologies and high tech industries in the country.
- The Hsinchu Science Park built an intensive connection with Silicon Valley in California, United States, and shaped the semiconductor industrial cluster in northern Taiwan.
- The Tainan Science Park transferred the thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) technology from Japan and shaped another high-technology industrial cluster in southern Taiwan.
- The Taichung Science Park has been booming in hosting domestic and overseas high-technology firms. Taichung park’ s policy lay in leveraging the “endogenous growth potential’, promoted and revived a traditional industrial base in the central Taiwan region, especially the machinery industry.
These three parks shaped the landscape of high technology industries in Taiwan and occupied a significant share of Taiwan’ s domestic manufacturing.
The paper argues that a different form of triple helix and triangular relationships connecting leading firms, global technical communities, and government policy can explain the geographically varied patterns of “strategic coupling” between the global production networks and local institutional embeddedness that shape regional / technological development in Taiwan.
This is an important argument supporting the globalisation of innovation systems thesis, due, among others, to global collaboration networks and virtual communities in technology and new product development.
Source: Regional Studies, Vol.43.3, pp. 369-384, April 2009