Over the past two decades, innovation districts have changed the landscape of research, culture, and collaboration worldwide. Through innovation districts, under-resourced urban areas, often the vestiges of post-industrial decline, are transformed into vibrant social and economic hubs. Further, academic institutions, startups, and large corporates work in close proximity and are united by the shared goal of open innovation.

Increasingly, innovation districts are engaging their local communities as essential thought and talent partners. These relationships foster systemic linkages between innovation and inclusivity. At SeedSprint, we endeavor to bring this model into the virtual sphere.

Today, there are over 100 innovation districts around the world. In the past, we have highlighted innovation hotspots around the world.

Now, we turn to the continent where it all began: Europe. Here are five innovation districts you need to know.

22@Barcelona: The Birthplace of Modern Innovation Districts

The concept of an innovation district was born in Barcelona, Spain in the year 2000. At that time, 22@Barcelona became the first municipal initiative of its kind. The district was the brainchild of the city council committee, Ajuntament de Barcelona. Since its inception, its goal has been to foster social, urban, and economic development.

Over the past 20 years, 22@Barcelona has successfully transformed El Pablenou, a former cotton mill district close to the city center, into a knowledge center and innovation hub.

Today, 22@Barcelona employs 90,000 people, houses 4,500 new companies, and attracts startups from around the world. The district’s greatest success is its emphasis on creating the social opportunities required for economic and cultural development. Most notably, the district promotes affordable housing, high living and working standards, and accessibility via public transit and walkability. The district also emphasizes the cross-sector collaboration of universities and research institutions, large corporations, startups, and the local community. 

According to the Barcelona & Catalonia Startup Hub’s 2019 report, Barcelona now has over 1,500 startups in more than 40 industries. 22@Barcelona’s success has inspired many cities around the world. Read on to discover some other European innovation districts that have followed suit!

Cumulus Amsterdam: Expanding Beyond Traditional Sectors 

In 2019, Amsterdam’s Cumulus Park emerged as a collaboration between the City of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), ING, and ROC College. Located in the Zuidoost neighborhood, the district was historically home to a cadre of medical research institutions.

Today, Cumulus Park offers physical spaces for students and entrepreneurs and myriad networking opportunities. The district is also in the process of opening a business campus.

Silicon Allee: Green Technology Innovation

Berlin’s innovation district, Silicon Allee, began as an online community in 2017. Silicon Allee aims to amplify the city’s technology startup scene as an international hub for open innovation. Mirroring Berlin’s innate sense of community and affordability, its campus includes offices, apartments, restaurants and bars, and event spaces. 

Silicon Allee serves as an “embassy” to Berlin’s blossoming startup scene. It promotes relationship-building between international partners and residents, allowing for open innovation to grow organically. Recently, Silicon Allee has been active in fostering green technology innovation in response to the ongoing climate crisis.

MIND Milan: The Resiliency of the Innovation District Model

In 2015, MIND Milan was established with the goal of boosting the life sciences sector. Fast forward to 2020, and Milan was, unfortunately, severely impacted in the early stages of the pandemic.

In response, the city has turned its innovation district, MIND, into a source of collaboration and social and economic revitalization. The district developed the MIND Reboot Plan for Italy. The plan’s key strategy was to leverage impact investments. These investments re-allocate resource that benefit the local community by combining sustainable economic development with social and scientific innovation.

Kampus Plus Warsaw: The Next Generation of Innovation Districts

Propelled by an economic growth rate that has quadrupled over the last 20 years, Warsaw is now home to Poland’s first innovation district, Kampus Plus. Like districts before it, Kampus Plus brings together universities, R&D, and locals to foster technology, product, and service innovation. 

Kampus Plus uses a “Living Lab” model to put innovations to the test in the very environment where they will be used: the city itself. This method promotes responsive and open innovation that reflects the real needs of the market and the local community.

Connect and Collaborate

To aid your further exploration of Europe’s innovation district scene and which ones may be the right partners for you, we have created a dynamic map. Watch this space to keep up-to-date on the latest additions as Europe continues to be a leader in open innovation.

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Last week on the seedsprint blog, innovation district expert Julie Wagner made the case that innovation district planners and designers ought to make inclusion a top priority in the development of their districts. (You can read Wagner’s guest post here if you missed it). Wagner explains that many innovation district designers do support building inclusion into their projects, but that the challenges of doing so are daunting. Not only must planners overcome centuries of inequality, but also layers of public and private bureaucracy, self-interest, and conflicting priorities.

As more and more cities turn to innovation districts as a means of jump-starting economic growth and urban renewal, innovation district proponents find themselves frequently defending their projects against the charge that “innovation districts equal gentrification.”

In light of all this, we wanted to know how innovation districts were meeting that challenge, as well as the broader goal of promoting diversity and inclusion in science and tech.

Here’s a look at one district that may be getting it right.

Leveraging “The Gig”

The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, created the Chattanooga Innovation District in 2015, ostensibly to take advantage of the opportunities created by the city’s new highspeed internet infrastructure (known locally as “the Gig”). While most innovation districts are anchored by research universities, hospitals, or major science or tech-affiliated companies, Chattanooga’s is built around the local electric and telecom utility (the entity responsible for the Gig) and the eleven-story Edney Innovation Center, home to co-working spaces, startups, “collision” spaces, business services, and more. Directly across the street from the Edney stands Patten Towers, a low-income apartment building.

Chattanooga is late to the innovation district game, which has allowed planners to evaluate the successes – and failures – of older districts. The result is a district described in a Brookings Institution case study as a place “where stakeholders are undertaking intentional efforts to ensure that low-income and minority residents are key participants in, and beneficiaries of, the area’s growth and development.” None of this has been easy. One person involved in the planning told Brookings that involving so many constituencies slowed the process in the beginning. However, planners hope that their early work will help the project succeed in the long run.

Effecting real change in the community

The district’s intentional efforts have been realized in a variety of programs and initiatives:

• TechGoesHome provides low-cost computer skills training, computer hardware, and internet access to area residents.
• TechTown provides scholarships and science, technology, engineering, and math education to area students aged 7-17.
• TechWorkforce, part of TechTown, offers adult education in software coding, communication, and other soft skills that startups and employers in the district demand.
• Company Lab (“Co.Lab”) and LAUNCH are startup accelerators focused on attracting underrepresented groups to the entrepreneur community. (How do these efforts stack up? In 2016, 30% of Co.Lab participants were from minority groups and 64% were female, outpacing countywide numbers).  
• Regional planning authorities have rolled out a variety of tax incentives to support affordable housing near the district (and throughout the city). Recently, the city government demonstrated its commitment by converting underused city buildings in the area to affordable housing and office space.

Despite all this, gentrification remains a stubborn fact. A 2018 study of Chattanooga’s innovation district found that between 2000 and 2015 (when the district was formally announced), the area was already undergoing “light gentrification.” Area households shifted “from lower class to lower-middle class and upper-middle class.” Spreading the wealth generated by science- and tech-led development is not an easy problem.

“Everyone around the country is trying to figure out how this works,” Marco Perez, vice-president of LAUNCH, told the Brookings Institution. “Chattanooga has a long way to go with regards to equity, but I think we’re the city that can actually figure out how to do it right.”  

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For the last decade a chorus of global researchers and academics have helped document an emerging geography of innovation and economic growth: innovation districts. Found primarily in cities and urbanizing areas, these districts leverage the research and innovation assets of universities, hospitals and businesses to create a “collaborate to compete” agenda and mindset. Unlike science parks and science corridors, the physical landscape in these districts is compact: innovation districts thrive on density and physical proximity, with the district connected to the wider community by public transportation and other 21^st Century infrastructure. In short, these locales leverage the assets of “the city” they are embedded in and do so with conviction and creativity.

In stepping back and observing their work, the deepest impression I have is that to do this well—where the range of actors in close proximity are leveraged, where the physical form is re-imagined to create walkable, open communities and where adequate financing is aligned and sequenced—requires tremendous leadership and strategic, empirically-grounded insight. It can take years, if not decades, to find the right balance of assets, to grow a new “collaborate to compete culture,” and to re-develop land that is often fragmented.

With many of today’s districts adjacent to low income communities, districts should not, nor can they, look only within themselves to create new engines of innovation, ingenuity and growth. Creating systemic linkages between innovation and inclusion is the right agenda for districts—even in the midst of the complexity of the work before them. In a world where scarcity of talent is commonplace, many districts are developing new, or re-inventing existing, local talent development systems: new schools, new programs, mentoring, workforce development training and more.

Many district leaders (who are pioneers in this emerging field) have internalized this imperative, and yet continue to express how their work is not enough. Even with a robust inclusion agenda, districts, for example, are quickly confronted with systemic challenges requiring a greater alignment with city, regional and even state actors:

• The desire to create a new, or enhance an existing school, requires the supportive engagement of government agencies and officials.
• The ability to link new jobs to workforce development training programs requires an alignment with government and not for profit programs.

This is an oversimplified summary and requires connecting disparate efforts to produce a system of meaningful training, streamlined job placement and supportive mentoring along the way. None of this is easy. It takes considerable time to learn new systems and find the right solutions.

And when these linkages do happen, and when they are working, I find that both district and community leaders continue to reflect that still more work is needed.

I am frequently asked by the media to explain how innovation districts are failing or to pinpoint their weaknesses. I believe the better approach is to first acknowledge that as a whole, we—in the United States as in many other countries—have failed to give all of our citizens the same access to opportunity and growth for hundreds of years. And as a result, we now have an outsized responsibility to do more.

While innovation districts should be a strategy to create new opportunities for local growth, I am deeply concerned that many districts will be shunned or become a source of anger from the broader population. Are they part of the problem, the one we have struggled with for centuries? Or are they part of a broad and integrated set of solutions?

In an upcoming paper soon to be released by the recently founded Global Institute on Innovation Districts, we look at the issue of innovation and inclusion with an honest reflection that more work is ahead. In this paper, “The Evolution of Innovation Districts: The New Geography of Global Innovation,” we reflect that districts are contending with the challenge of linking innovation and inclusion. In the United States, in particular, a country experiencing deep economic divides, local leaders and residents have questioned whether innovation districts will ameliorate or exacerbate this complex and longstanding challenge. In response, the imperative for meaningful inclusion—where innovation districts work for everyone—will stimulate what is likely to be a new set of inclusion and social innovation strategies to guide districts in the future.

Innovation districts, when blended with ambitious inclusion strategies from the start, are the right agenda, one that comes at the right time.

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Though open innovation is the gold standard for forward-thinking corporations to maintain a competitive edge, both providers of emerging technology (startups, universities, and other institutions) and technology-seekers (corporations) still face many roadblocks. As the tech-holder, you face the problem of marketing and sharing your idea without giving up intellectual property rights. As the tech-seeker, you face a limited network in a globalized world.

Tech-Providers Maximize Returns

As the inventor, you might know everything about particle physics or quantum mechanics. However, it’s unlikely that you’re an expert on patent law or intellectual property rights. In fact, commercializing your idea may be more difficult than pursuing your scientific research.

First, you have to find out how to get your tech to market. In order to market your tech to potential investors and collaborators, you need to show potential investors how your tech works and its potential market applications. You risk exposing valuable trade secrets. To avoid this problem, a smart tech-holder has a valid and effective non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in place. Even with a powerful NDA in place, you probably wouldn’t share your patent with someone you hadn’t met or worked with.

You shouldn’t share your ideas with abandon, as many countries do not respect international patent laws. For that matter, many domestic companies may be able to reverse-engineer your patent to come up with a slightly different version. Given all of this headache, it might seem like it’s not worth putting your patent through the commercialization process.

Enter seedsprint, a networking platform that makes tech transfer easy. With seedsprint, you can make valuable industry connections. Through our network, verified individuals can view details of a particular technology in a secure virtual data room and you can immediately request that they sign an NDA.

Further, our platform serves as a virtual innovation district.  Like a city with the proper infrastructure to support open innovation, seedsprint supports all aspects of commercialization. This starts with the research and ends in patent licensing, an industry-university partnership and commercialization. Further, the more content you have on our platform, the greater your ability to take your entire research ecosystem to the next level. You can build your institution’s ecosystem on the platform by adding technologies for license, and also by inviting affiliated startups and research projects. Putting your institution’s entire tech ecosystem on display gives you access to more opportunities within a global open innovation network.

Corporations Find Emerging Technologies

As a corporate tech scouts, your goals are often aligned with those of tech-providers: you want to find the best tech for your company, increase efficiency and profits, and gain access to global markets. Current methods for doing this can be limited in scope. If you are interested in developing an industry-university partnership, for instance, how can you gain access to more than a handful of the world’s universities?

Even as a powerful corporation, your network may be geographically limited. Many companies engage in tech transfer only in European and North American markets. Should you happen to be located in an innovation district, there is still a good chance that the district does not have all the tech you seek. For example, you may be based in the Americas but want to connect with tech in China, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. Tech transfer research limited to North American and European markets is likely to miss out on some of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy.

You could spend an enormous amount of time and energy researching global tech and flying around the world to meet with prospective candidates, or, you could join a virtual global innovation district like seedsprint. Our platform can help you form industry-university partnerships, identify and access global tech, and keep your business up-to-date on cutting edge developments in science-based technologies.

Fast-track Your Open Innovation Pipeline

Open innovation works best in an unrestricted environment. At seedsprint, we understand this. We have built a user-friendly network, based on the simple idea that global collaboration is the key to maintaining a competitive edge in a rapidly-innovating world.

We will be at the 2019 AUTM Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas to showcase our platform and give prospective users the opportunity to explore its ability to make open innovation easier than ever. As you understand, the hardest aspect of commercialization is matching tech with companies ready to assist with commercialization goals. With seedsprint, a global database of patents and willing collaborators can be at your fingertips. Our network creates a secure and collaborative environment, which makes the process of open innovation and commercialization more efficient and competitive.

Find seedsprint at booth 505 at AUTM. Otherwise, feel free to check out our website to learn more about how startups, researchers, and industry giants can all benefit from joining our network.

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Universities, corporations, and startups all stand to benefit from this new approach to work and urban planning.

How can a startup, university or corporation join a great innovation district and help make their innovation district successful?

Technology Innovation Districts

An innovation district is a zone within a city that is home to a cluster of related entities: co-working and incubators, startups, academic institutions, industry, and government offices.

Startups and corporations take note: innovation districts are becoming popular in urban planning circles. Some city governments or anchor organizations, like universities, are looking to attract young companies to get districts started quickly. For companies, districts can be a boon for networking and relationship building. For cities, innovation districts can spark economic growth and diversification – and even improve quality of life for workers.

These districts are popping up around the world in cities that want to achieve better synchronicity between work and their citizens’ daily lives. They are meant to bring housing, public transportation, the arts, and commerce closer together. The idea is that physical proximity is key to building new relationships: research says that successful innovation districts usually feature no more than a ten-minute walk between two points within the district.

Measuring the Impact of Innovation Districts

Cities realize that there’s huge value in helping startups and corporations make the right connections at the right time. In a way, we see seedsprint as a virtual innovation district, where companies can form strategic relationships and bring new technology to market. That’s why we’re following the innovation district trend closely as it plays out in cities around the world.

The work of Julie Wagner, with the Brookings Institution’s Centennial Scholar Initiative, is an excellent resource on the innovation district trend. Wagner and her team determined the 5 key components are required to develop an attractive, sustainable and economically viable innovation district.

1.) Critical Mass

Much of the success of an innovation district has to do with the diversity and density of a site’s assets. Even though co-working is even becoming popular in the suburbs, a metropolitan area might be the better choice for an innovation district, since density is higher and interactions between groups are easier to facilitate. Wagner cites Oklahoma City as an example of a city with sufficient density in its downtown district. Density of population and employment increase the chances for a district’s successful launch and growth.

2.) Competitive Advantage

Another key factor is the future district’s competitive advantage, the building blocks of which typically relate to knowledge creation – particularly emerging technologies. Recognition for achievement in specific fields, e.g., within life science, software development, or rapid manufacturing, can be an important driver of growth. The ability to commercialize new knowledge is a key test of a district’s strengths.

3.) Quality of Place

How is the quality of life in the district? Does the culture of the district attract more assets to the surrounding community? If you want to gauge whether a district fits the bill, check out the Bass Initiative’s research on the qualities of great places.

4.) Diversity & Inclusion

Innovation districts build upon an existing population zone, and it is essential to engage with the residents who pre-date the district. While potential economic opportunity is attractive, it needs to be introduced thoughtfully and inclusively. Strong local buy-in can foster new commercial relationships with merchants and service providers, enriching the whole ecosystem.

5.) Culture & Collaboration

Ultimately, innovation districts are all about culture and collaboration. To work well, a district must be a multi-dimensional place where people can find each other easily and build things together – such as new technology, businesses, events, or a cultural landscape. Productive innovation districts encourage workers to learn outside their immediate circles and work across disciplines.

When all five of Wagner’s criteria are met, innovation districts facilitate networking, ingenuity and relationship-building. Even with favorable conditions and the right mix of assets, innovation districts need to be nurtured by the organizations that occupy them and by their host cities. (Read what one writer had to say about the bustling Seaport innovation district in Boston.)

It may be a challenge to form a successful district, but the rewards seem to be worth the effort. Startups, research universities, and industry are all positioned to benefit from the rise of innovation districts – and today, more and more of them are making the leap.

seedsprint is a platform that connects corporations to new technologies and startups – like an innovation district you can access from anywhere in the world. Create a free profile or request a demo today.

Join the seedsprint community

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