The Chiang Mai University (CMU) is one of the leading Universities in Thailand with a strong focus on interdisciplinary research and a presentable worldwide reputation. Based on the recognition that there is a great gap between research and knowledge on one side and innovation and commercialization on the other side, the CMU founded the Science and Technology Park (SteP) to overcome the so called “Valley of death” by bringing together Academia and Industry, as well as the Private Sector and Public organisations. It offers a variety of services like technological business incubation, technology transfer, collaborative research, testing, training and mentoring and infrastructure services.

The STeP's approach consists of 5 platforms and 9 key actions:

Platforms:

1. Incubation for start-ups and spin-offs and research on market competition
2. STI Service (STI Infrastructure, Intellectual Properties Management and Design)
3. Co-research (Collaborative Research with private sector)
4. IRTC (Industrial research and Technology Capacity Development)
5. Pilot Plant (Pilot Plant for Scale up Research and Development)

Key actions:

1. Analyzing related international context and generating a national and regional strategy
2. Creation of innovation roadmap
3. Demand analyses and identification of external stakeholders
4. Supply analyses and identification of internal stakeholders
5. Proposal of new internal player
6. Proposal of potential projects
7. Identification of sources of funding
8. Estimation of revenue, KPI’s and possible outcome
9. Development of a business plan and strategy implementation

The output of technical or science-oriented research usually is invention and not innovation. To overcome this circumstance triple helix models (university-industry-government) need to be implemented in order to foster innovation and business development. It can be differentiated between inside-out-learnings and outside-in learnings. The former describes learning streams from research and technology studies to the business development and commercialization and the latter refers to learnings from industry requests. Especially for the inside-out process the described valley of death is a big challenge, which needs to be tackled by sufficient and equivalent funds.