Performance Measures to Assess the Success of Contemporary Science Parks

Although the science park (SP) concept is more than 50 years old, it has been continuously evolving and changing and new doubts, questions and needs have come to light. In order to understand and talk about the future of SPs, it seems necessary to understand their actual level of success. It is not a straightforward task as SPs are multi-owner organisations and definition of success will vary from one SP to another. Moreover SPs have developed new roles and activities that are not easy to measure. Thereby, the aim of this paper is to fill in the gaps that exist in the literature on measuring the extent of success of contemporary SPs as individual organisations providing support for the benefit of its community. The paper proposes to measure SP success by means of a performance measurement system (PMS). It offers a theory grounded tool to assess the effectiveness of SP actions and activities including knowledge-based activity. Additionally, the paper provides some strong evidence that SPs show characteristics in common with knowledge intensive organisations (KIOS) and therefore play an important role in orchestrating innovation ecosystems.