ABSTRACT
The technopolis program is distinctive, because - unlike any other project considered in this book, indeed any such project anywhere - it is so vast. It is a national plan, master-minded by MITI - Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry - to create an entire series of new science cities in the country’s peripheral areas, in order simultaneously to promote new technologies and develop lagging regions. The aim is thus audacious: it is literally to create a whole set of new innovative milieux, thus transferring the power to generate new commercial technologies from the heart of the country, to places that previously lacked that capacity. The plan seeks to achieve this aim though multiple strategies: concentrating public and private research institutes, promoting hybrid technologies, upgrading local university laboratories, establishing technology centers, funding joint R&D projects, and providing R&D funding.1
