Invitation to a World Technopolis Association international conference in September

A few weeks ago I received an invitation to give a panel speech at the forthcoming Preparatory Conference for the Daejeon Global Innovation Forum, a meeting to be held on September 25 and 26 in Daejon.  It is being organized by Daejeon Metropolitan City, the World Technopolis Association and UNESCO.  My panel session is on the topic of "innovation clusters in the creative economy."   The invitation is most interesting to me for several reasons.  One is that I did my graduate work at Stanford where Silicon Valley grew up alongside and in interaction with the university.  Another, of course, is that the Daedok Innopolis is far and away South Korea's largest and leading technopolis, and is about to become even as it forms the center of a much larger "global science belt."  I was fortunate to visit the Daejon Expo twice back in 1993, and that event gave a measurable impetus to the development of Daejon and the Daedok Innopolis as Korea's premier science city.   It is a welcome opportunity to do some reading and reflection on the role of urban technology clusters in fostering the "creative economy" that is a central goal of the Park Geun-hye administration.