Preparations have already begun for the 18th Technology and Science Parks Conference, which in June 2001 will be held in the Palacio Euskalduna, Bilbao. In September the necessary contacts were made for the organization of the complex framework entailed in the holding of an international congress of these characteristics. This week the Bilbao 2001 World Technology and Science Parks Conference will bring together, in Biskay's capital city, more than two hundred parks and nearly four hundred science and technology specialists from around the world.
     It was in November last year that Bilbao was designated as site for the conference, the first to be held in the new millennium. The work done by the Technology Park in Zamudio is thus recognized. These conferences have the backing of the International Association of Science and Technology Parks (IASP), by which they are supervised. Their organization is funded by the Technology Park Network of the Basque Country, the SPRI, and the Department of Industry of the Basque Government.
     From the outset the aim of these conferences has been to serve as a forum for examining new trends in technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, to promote between parks not only collaboration but also the exchange of knowledge gained from experience.
     The starting point for the Conferencia Bilbao 2001 will be the construction of the Knowledge Era, based on science and technology. As Mauri Lazkano, Chairman of the Technology Park Network of the Basque Country, points out, “the dramatic pace of technological advance and innovation allows one to glimpse a major aspect of the society of the future, namely, the key importance of the person from an overall point of view. Hence one already speaks of the Knowledge Era, an era in which the person is indisputably the protagonist. At root we are closer to a new Renaissance than to an Industrial Revolution.”
     Set up in 1984, the IASP currently embraces nearly two hundred technology parks in forty-three countries. These in turn involve some 40,000 high-technology and innovation companies. Since it was set up it has truly been a platform for cooperation between firms, as well as for the promotion of technology diffusion and transfer.