Norlena Hasnan

Relationship between Social Capital and Technology Transfer Performance: A Study on Companies in Technology Park

Tacit knowledge and personal experience of an individual can only be obtained in a tacit manner. Social capital is a prominent concept that provides a foundation to describe and characterize the properties. Therefore social interaction is very important to facilitate technological knowledge transfer among the units within an organisation. This paper aims to contribute to the existing knowledge in the field of technology transfer by exploring the concept of social capital. It discusses the technology transfer performance and focuses on the important firm-specific asset, which is social capital. By using the data from a survey on industrial firms in one of the technology parks in Malaysia, this paper provides an investigation on the relationship between social capital and technology transfer performance, within the technology park incubating company setting. It was found that social capital has significant relationships with the performance of technology transfer.

Technology Park Services: The Impact on Incubating Companies

The development of technology parks in Malaysia creates the expectations that they will contribute significantly to the industrialization. Therefore, there is increasing number of research conducted on technology parks performance. However, there is still uncertainty about whether technology parks are achieving their goals or not and exactly what their impact is on their tenants. To contribute to understanding this issue, this paper focuses specifically on the impact of technology park services on high technology industries. A case study on one of the well-established technology parks in Malaysia that is Kulim Hi-Tech Park (KHTP) has been conducted. After a series of interviews with the administrator and review of literature, nine evaluation criteria were identified and used to observe the impact of technology park services on the industrial tenants of the technology park. From a survey on the industrial tenants in KHTP, it is found that the technology park has all the nine evaluated criteria. However, these criteria have different categories of impact on the tenants. It can be concluded that there is still more room to improve in ensuring the competitiveness of the technology park. This study could be extended to other technology parks in the whole country.