SFU Beedie School of Business professor Ian McCarthy has advice for anyone planning to develop a research park: “Imagine that it’s ten years in the future and the Wall Street Journal is writing about how amazing your park is—about all the things it has achieved. You should be driven by that long-term goal, instead of by short-term opportunities and revenue from renting space.”

Stanford University is famous for its immensely successful research park, but when universities across the world copied that model, the results varied considerably. McCarthy wanted to know why and he borrowed a technique from evolutionary biology to find the answer.

McCarthy started out studying engineering in England. One of his early research projects mapped the evolution of the automotive industry from craft production to mass production to lean production. While visiting his University of Sheffield PhD supervisor, McCarthy was inspired to investigate research parks using the same approach. “No one had looked into the DNA of research parks to understand what makes some parks succeed where others fail,” he says. His colleague Mark Collard, an SFU professor of archaeology and also a graduate of the University of Sheffield, suggested that McCarthy try cladistics, a method for mapping and describing the genesis, development and diversity of systems that evolve.

No stranger to outreach, McCarthy employs online and social media to share his work, which he feels strongly will provide strategic blueprints to engage university research park developers worldwide.  One of his recent papers received the Business Horizons Best Article Award 2011 and has garnered a high number of citations within a few months. McCarthy has been described as one of the top business professors to follow on Twitter. In 2010, he won the TD Canada Trust Distinguished Teaching Award. His current research park investigation was initially funded by a collaborative Fulbright New Century scholarship. This research is part of the Human Evolutionary Studies Program that is funded by the SFU Community Trust Endowment Fund.

“The evolutionary model I’m focusing on has three processes: variation, selection, and retention,” says McCarthy. Variation creates many different strategies or “species” of university research parks across the world. Selection then deems some park strategies to be viable. Retention is the process whereby successful parks or their specific strategies are imitated by other parks around the world. “We want to understand the mechanisms that give rise to diversity and why some kinds of research parks are selected and others aren’t,” says McCarthy. Using interview data collected from managers at 15 parks in four different countries, McCarthy and colleagues have identified several management themes that create successful parks.

These include:
•    Specialization – single industry or multi-sector (both can work, depending on circumstances)
•    Business development services – training, networking, community, and investment
•    Governance – board diversity, including entrepreneurs and investors with administrators
•    Growth strategies – acreage or building limitations, development potential
•    The university context – park proximity to university, location (rural versus urban), private versus public, and research strengths.

McCarthy claims the most successful parks are those that concentrate on a single sector. “Parks are like gardens, so a garden with only one type of plant is going to require a less diverse set of expertise and resources,” he says. Multi-sector parks grow at varying rates, in different directions and have dissimilar resource and development needs which makes their management much more complex. Single sector parks are easier to run, but the number of potential tenant firms is smaller.

In addition, parks that actively promote community and personal networks are more likely to survive. Ever the Englishman, McCarthy advises putting a pub in the middle of every research park so as to facilitate the flow of knowledge and social capital needed to develop new ventures.

A supportive, altruistic environment generally increases the success rate of a park, prompting McCarthy to make a final surprising observation: non-profit parks are much more successful than those which focus on generating income from rental or business development services. He says, “A park’s success is found in a nurturing environment, which helps businesses thrive so they create wealth for the entire community. It’s not in the generation of wealth for the park itself.”