Housing - not science - is the best use of land at Science Park's fourth phase
A successful Science Park requires us to be larger and more vertically integrated in technology
They couldn't script it better in Hollywood. Last week the government made noises about taking away the site of the proposed Phase 4 of Science Park for housing and, right on schedule, Science Park launches a study to discover new uses for Phase 4.
They will be fashionable ones, too, what a surprise - help for the elderly and for small and medium enterprises. If only Science Park chairman Nick Brooke, a career property man, could learn to wrap his tongue around words like "holistic" and "socially inclusive stakeholder" the pitch could be politically correct the whole way.
We are given some examples of the new ideas, however, for instance a sob story about a man whose mother couldn't keep up with the family on her iPad and so he invented a way of letting her do it on television. Now it's a bright new Science Park start-up. How heart-warming.
The grandmothers of my acquaintance have long locked into FaceTime on their iPads to keep in touch with their offspring. In my family it's referred to as granny crack, they're so addicted to it.
Then we have another mobile application (the hundredth of its ilk) that allows people to find their way in a shopping mall. Why only in a shopping mall? Why not in the Sai Kung Country Park?
When you have finished figuring it out, you may wish to ask why the public purse should help pay malls to pull in customers. Is there so little chance of the merchants themselves paying the writers of this app that Science Park has to sponsor them? How strange. Just asking.
You may have noticed, by the way, that a disproportionate number of these subsidised tenants of Science Park and Cyberport spend their time writing commercial mobile phone apps for local use. These rate above the stone axe in technological sophistication but not by much.
It's a lucrative business, however, and if the government is willing to make it even more lucrative with cheap floor rents, well, why not? I cannot fault the logic, on the tenant side of this bargain that is.
It's also just grand for the university professor who first uses public-funded research to devise an application he thinks has commercial possibilities and then nips out the back door to set himself up with it as a private money-making venture at Science Park or Cyberport. The taxpayer gets stung twice.
Let's be factual about real technological innovation. If you really do achieve it and try to make anything of it outside Hong Kong, you will quickly find American patent trolls all over you, claiming that they thought of it first and demanding huge ransoms from you before you can make any money from it.
If it really is any good you will just have to sell it outright for a low price to Apple or Microsoft Corp or some other big hi-tech company that has the strength and know-how to fight off the trolls. That's the way of the world.
Hong Kong will never be a hi-tech centre. In Taiwan and Seoul, let alone California, they laugh at this conceit and consider us a fourth-rate also-ran. We would need to be much larger, much longer established and much more vertically integrated in technology to have any hope of success.
To foresee our fate if we keep trying it, just look at Singapore, squandering billions and deep in deficit on investment income in its balance of payments in a vain attempt to create a self-sustaining hi-tech industry, which actually only survives because it is kept alive in a perpetual government cradle.
Residential development is by far the best idea for that Science Park Phase 4 land. As a matter of fact, a little application of the bulldozer would also make it a top idea for Phase 3.
And Phase 2, and Phase 1.
