Welcome to the Smart Startup English Podcast!
Our goal is to help startup professionals take their English from intermediate to advanced in just 10 minutes at a time. In each episode, we’ll talk about a topic related to the startup world, and we’ll learn some vocabulary that you can use to sound more natural in your day-to-day business interactions in English.
In this week’s episode, we’re talking about science and technology parks.
Technology parks are places that bring together universities, companies, startups and other stakeholders in order to work together and promote a culture of innovation.
These parks are physical locations where these stakeholders rent office space to work and to keep connected to what’s going on in the industry.
A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in and is affected by an organization’s actions. So for a company, the stakeholders might be the founders, the employees, investors, creditors, shareholders, suppliers, communities and generally anyone who is involved in a company and has an interest in its success.
Are there any science and technology parks in your country?
If you can’t think of any, you should do a quick internet search once you’re done listening to this episode.
In this episode, we use the term “technology park,” but the full name is actually Science and Technology Park – or STP, for short. There are a couple of other names for this concept, such as research park, technopolis or technopoles.
It doesn’t really matter what you call it, the concept is the same.
The first modern university research park in the world started in the 1950s as a cooperative venture between Stanford University and the City of Palo Alto in California.
Currently, there are technology parks all over the world – in India, Iran, Sweden, Finland, Spain, the UK, the US, Russia, South Korea, South Africa and so on.
There is even an international association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation.
In this episode, we’ll also teach you 14 Business English terms you can use to talk about technology parks and areas of innovation.
Here are a few of the expressions we use in this lesson:
- the knowledge economy
- cross-fertilization of ideas
- key tenants (or anchor tenants)
Here’s the episode audio.
And if you’re interested in the topic of innovation, check out this episode.
Episode 16 – The price of missing out on innovation
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If you want to keep practicing the words you’ve learned in this lesson, sign up below to get the episode transcript for free. We’ll also let you know when we release new episodes, and we’ll give you access to ten free Business English audio lessons and worksheets.
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Image credits: TU Delft Library in Mekel Park in The Netherlands (by Mickey Gast)
