What Does It Take for an Academic Town to Become More Than Just Academic?

When people talk about dynamic centers of future industries in Japan outside Tokyo, Tsukuba, a town some 45 minutes by train north of Tokyo, gets frequent mentions. Home to high rankin, tech focused University of Tsukuba, the national space agency JAXA, and various state-funded science research organizations, the town is supposed to use its human capital in STEM to propel a series of successful tech startups, just as Stanford and Berkeley help to fuel Silicon Valley with human talent.

There is one big problem with that vision. Unlikely San Francisco, Tsukuba is really boring. The city "center" is a couple of smallish shopping centers surrounding the train and bus stations that help people get to Tokyo and other nearby cities. Beyond the few blocks of the "center" are endless parks, nondescript offices and labs for academic research and teaching, along with equally nondescript apartment blocks to house bureaucrats, academics, and students that make up the bulk of the city's "dynamic tech" population.

The city certainly has attempted to attract casual visitors. Taking advantage of its reputation for science, it has come up  with a series of museums for adults and kids to get in touch with the latest advances in research and development, often through memorable interactive displays. And with the city home to plenty of foreign scholars and researchers, getting many foreigners to come, even as mere visits to family and friends, are certainly easier than towns of similar sizes around the region.

But a developed tech startup hub it certainly is not. Tokyo, with all its venture capital, tech ecosystem, and oodles more qualified talent, is simply too strong of draw and too geographically close. While plenty of research can be commercialized from Tsukuba's research labs, there is no reason to do so here aside from finding cheap land and building a tight-knit team bound by geographic proximity. But as successful startups grow, if they stay in Tsukuba, they will inevitably face the constraint of financing, markets, and business networks needed to get to the next stage.

Even cheap and plentiful open land, which can be considered a major advantage of Tsukuba compared to cities closer to Tokyo, the advantage is not as obvious as it seems. With research facilities spread out across a public transport-devoid area that take more than one hour to traverse by car, there is no burning reason for tech focused startups to be in Tsukuba if nearby cities are just as accessible by car and offer even cheaper land.

Indeed, the city's entire physical infrastructure is not designed for cross-institutional cooperation. With research facilities and universities physically isolated from one another, even if each hosts their own programs facilitating the setup and growth of startups, little physical space exist that allow people from these disparate institutions to get together casually in one place and bounce new ideas off each other. Even in the city "center," there are no startup cafes and shared offices that are now sprouting around Tokyo.

Perhaps the lack of a sound environment for nurturing startups in Tsukuba comes down to the nature of the town's science focus. Tsukuba became a center for science research not organically through the decision of individual institutions seeking a good environment, but largely due to the top-down action of a state that decided to build all the facilities in one town to foster specialization. The result is a town that excel at science, but entirely on the back of non-locals that shuttle in to provide their expertise but has little emotional or economic attachment to the town itself.

Of course, such a sad reality is not unique to Tsukuba, and trouble government officials around the world as they seek to outdo each other in creating new, future-proof engines of economic growth. But as Tsukuba shows, just mandating the clusterization of tech in one place through policy and public spending is not enough to trigger private efforts to follow automatically. A bigger issue may be to create a mentality of organic collaboration and financing that ultimately get talent to concentrate in one place without the need for the government to tell people to gather.