The role of the Technology Districts (TDs) for the regional development: background, performance indicators, policy implications

The global economy is changing at an unprecedented rate: science, technology, knowledge and innovation are at the hearth of these transformations, not only because technology is itself a key driver of globalization, but also because national and regional systems will increasingly derive their competitive edge from the speed with which they are able to innovate. In order to create major attractiveness as a location for research, science and innovation, recently different national and regional systems have decided to build a new strategy to face the global challenge based on the creation of specific and right “ecosystems” able to connect world-class science base, advanced knowledge and business. Accordingly, the design and the creation of “technology districts” (TDs) are emerged as key-levers to activate and support new knowledge-based development paths for national and local systems. The aims of this paper are to briefly analyze the main features of the TDs and their role into regional development dynamics, and then to adopt the Performance Prism (Neely et al,, 2002) as a conceptual framework addressing the definition of TDs performance indicators. The paper ends underlining that the decision to adopt a specific set of the proposed indicators is strongly linked to the strategic planning and to the governance structure of the TD.