Sustainable STP´s Management Trends

According to the data obtained by APTE (Spanish Science & Technology Parks Association), the current economic and social crisis has also influenced into the increasing number of STPs and companies installed or linked to them in Spain, i.e. it has become stationary or lightly declining. Nevertheless, there is a general conviction, that this process is going to be reverted but it will require, in any case, reconsideration in the new STP role, that is to say STP's challenge is their regeneration process. If at any time the infrastructures, buildings, office and labs with generous equipment made sense and really provide a differential value, it seems that today they are not enough elements to attract the best projects.\n\nOn the one hand, the human factor, is actually determinant: talented entrepreneurs and a powerful networking together with top universities and research centres combined with adequate and progressively continuous funding and, of course, a nice quality of life are the crucial factors to achieve an efficient ecosystem. On the other hand, the management of STPs, traditionally, have been funded by the government for the processing of grants or by real estate business, land and/or offices, laboratories and workshops, with suitable teams to performing this function. Nowadays, except for a few number of consolidated Parks with very low debts, most management companies are in a process of focusing its strategy, looking at business model, focus of the value proposition to strengthen and adjusting their teams with the purpose to give more agile and the most efficient response to the new requirements.\n\nBased on the current situation, and through an exhaustive compilation of information from the Spanish Science and Technology Parks, APTE has tried to identify a desirable and suitable new balanced funding model. For such analysis, it has been using the Six Thinking Hats model4: White Objective, Green Creative, Yellow Positive, Black Negative, Red Intuitive and Blue Process with the goal of expanding the options of adding value to businesses. The starting point is based on basic questions: Who is my Customer/Buyer/User? What is the key problem of my client? How could we solve it? To move in this direction we have focused with a mind map by adopting a creative approach, incorporating added value and benefits. Leaving aside the already known negative aspects it has been tried to focus on the positive aspects and the reasons we have for cautious optimism. Concepts such as open innovation and the combination of Lean, Scrum and Kanban methods have been used with the support of tools like Trello or Kimai. In every process there is always an intuitive component that is checked by various trial and error tests and a proper process of continuous improvement, providing discriminating value of wasted time and energy. Projects and Processes based management combined with good indicators with appropriate metrics and achievable goals, which are reflected in a balanced scorecard, will allow its successful implementation.\n\nThe situation does not apply only to Spain, Europe as a whole has to be reinvented itself. It is required to define a new STP approach in order to strengthen the sustainability of the STP, helping to build the ecosystem and contributing significantly to the economic development of the area in which they are based on. A radical transformation of these entities for this new century is required. Next steps? STPs has to apply to themselves the same advice the it proposes to their entrepreneurs: working under a StartUp perspective: STPs need to re-built the end user profile with an accuracy market segmentation and, whenever is possible, some specialisation. Co-working with the customers trying to understand the full value chain, in all the different steps of the companies, or establishing services and projects specifications are a due. The redefinition of every core and the new strategic position, mapping the process to acquire and retain customers, calculating the Total Addressable Market Size, designing STP's Business Model, setting the pricing framework, mapping the process to acquire a customer and the cost of customer acquisition, identifying and testing the key assumptions, defining STP's Minimum Viable Business Product, show that the dogs will eat the dog food and finally develop a Product Plan5. Finally we propose a balanced funding model in order to guarantee the future of STPs.