When futurist Anthony Townsend ponders the world’s up-and-coming innovation hot spots, he tends to skip over the gargantuan, multibillion-dollar science parks going up in cities like Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul. Instead, he homes in on places like Kitchen Budapest, or Kibu. An artists’ colony of sorts on a hip street in downtown Budapest, Kibu is what Townsend, research director at the Institute for the Future, describes as a “pop-up lab.”
Founded in 2007 with a few million dollars from Magyar Telekom, Kibu leases space in a small, loft-like building to a couple of dozen people with the hope that common interests and random encounters will bring them together to create digital media and communications products. It already has had a promising commercial success: Software startup Prezi developed a tool to make visually interesting presentations that some analysts say could challenge Microsoft’s PowerPoint.
While Kibu is hardly a science park — it’s not affiliated with a university or research institute, for instance — it could mark a turning point in product development. For the last 40 years, research parks have been the model for moving ideas from university labs into the marketplace. The parks also have strived to incubate startups that could grow into corporations that would keep their headquarters and talent close to home.
That campus-centric view is becoming out of date, Townsend argues in a study to be released at the International Association of Science Parks annual conference June 1-4 at North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. As Web 2.0 tools and telecommunication make it easier for inventors, engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs to work wherever they want, they also are fostering novel kinds of “knowledge ecosystems.”
“Research Clouds”
Low-budget pop-up labs like Kibu are but one example of new kinds of physical spaces for collaboration tracked by Townsend as part of an Institute for the…