By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter
Auckland City Council and Auckland University have launched an ambitious plan to create 10,000 high-paid, high-tech jobs around the university's Tamaki campus.
The council's implementation planning manager, Ian Maxwell, told a seminar at Tamaki on Friday that the redevelopment was aimed at transforming the fairly rundown industrial
area between the old Mt Wellington quarry and the Glen Innes shops into New Zealand's answer to Singapore, or to Britain's Cambridge science park.
"Our vision is 10,000 jobs - five times the number that exist now," he said.
We have looked at Singapore, parts of Australia and Europe and that sort of figure is not out of the way.
"We are looking at knowledge workers.
"They can choose Cambridge or Brisbane or San Francisco or wherever, so we have to make this development something special.
"We are talking about an integrated development right across the Tamaki area."
Planners propose three separate zones in the area:
* The 32ha Tamaki university campus itself, which includes space at the southern end on Morrin Rd for public and private sector partners with close links to university researchers.
* A 10ha "technology park", also on the western side of Morrin Rd just south of the university campus, which may be bought by the council so that it can be leased only to firms that fit into the campus's six research themes.
* A much larger area of about 100ha comprising the existing industrial zone between the quarry and the Panmure railway where business development will be unrestricted apart from possible requirements for higher "amenity" to attract "knowledge workers".
Campus head Professor Ralph Cooney said the six campus themes spanned health, sports and community; information and communications technology and electronics; information management; food and biotechnology; environment, energy and resources; and materials and manufacturing.
He said the university had agreed to build five new buildings of 20,000 sq m each for companies in areas related to these themes, such as health computing firms, resource management companies and high-tech businesses generally.
"I am now in negotiation with 20 organisations to locate here," he said. "Right now our situation is not a lack of interest. It's a lack of capacity to respond to demand."
Mr Maxwell said the city council was about to appoint a Development Enterprise Board to buy land in areas such as the proposed Morrin Rd technology park and lease it to appropriate businesses.
"The aim of being able to vet firms locating in the innovation precinct, so that they can contribute to links with the university and the downstream commercial research, is important," he said.
"It means picking winners."
Other parks springing up around the country
Auckland's other technology park, Smales Farm at Takapuna, expects to announce an anchor tenant for its proposed third building in the next month.
The 12ha site, which houses the head offices of TelstraClear and Toll Rail and the local branch of Electronic Data Systems (EDS), aims to employ 5000 to 6000 people in 17 buildings - almost as many as the planned Tamaki high-tech zones.
Like Tamaki, it is associated with a university.
In this case, Massey University sits on the park's governing board along with members of the Smale family, which once owned much of the North Shore from Takapuna to Campbells Bay.
The third building, due for completion late next year, will be on Taharoto Rd just south of TelstraClear.
It will have about 10,000sq m over five storeys, including a cafe, gym and meeting rooms.
Down at Ruakura, near Hamilton, the Waikato Innovation Park completed its first 3600sq m building last year and is building its second, in which the anchor tenant will be British-based Nupharm, which makes up drugs for testing.
The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology's director of innovation and commercialisation, Dr Chris Kirk, said Palmerston North also planned a $2 million "Biocommerce Centre" as the centre of a proposed technology park, and the Auckland University of Technology had a "park" in a former Fletchers office building in Penrose.
But he said none of these developments were big enough to qualify as true technology parks on a global scale. "In New Zealand we now have 12 high-growth incubators. What we don't have is any grow-out space," he said.
www.smalesfarm.com
www.innovationwaikato.co.nz
www.biocommerce.co.nz
www.techpark.aut.ac.nz
By SIMON COLLINS, science reporter
Auckland City Council and Auckland University have launched an ambitious plan to create 10,000 high-paid, high-tech jobs around the university's Tamaki campus.
The council's implementation planning manager, Ian Maxwell, told a seminar at Tamaki on Friday that the redevelopment was aimed at transforming the fairly rundown industrial
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