The History of the Triple Helix Movement
Triple Helix movement, launched by Prof. Henry Etzkowitz and Prof. Loet Leydesdorff, began in 1996 when a workshop was organized in Amsterdam to discuss the Triple Helix model. This first workshop brought together of 90 researchers and attracted participation from Latin America, Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. The workshop was subsequently referred to as the first international conference on the Triple Helix.
The second international Triple Helix conference was organized two years later in new York, USA (1998), followed by bi-annual events in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2000), Copenhagen, Denmark and Lund, Sweden (2002), Turin, Italy (2005), Singapore (2007) and Glasgow, UK (2009). These conferences explored scientific research in the field of: the relationship of science, industry, and government and their role in creating the conditions for future innovation; the importance of location; the capitalization of knowledge; cognitive, economic, social and cultural aspects of innovation; emerging models for the entrepreneurial university; regional diversities and global convergence; boundary spanning interactions, linking the different national cultures and innovation systems; job creation and social wealth.
The growing number of participants demanded the coordination of intensified annual events and Triple Helix conferences after 2009. The growing interest and participation in the Triple Helix movement, lead also to the idea of creating an Association that is able to pull together and facilitate interactions among international scholars sharing common research interests. In 2009 the creation of the Triple Helix Association (THA) took place in Turin, Italy, where the TH Association is headquartered at Fondazione Rosselli, and is chaired by Prof. Henry Etzkowitz, having Prof. Loet Leydesdorff and Prof. José Manoel Carvalho de Mello as Vice-Presidents.
The creation of the association and the organization of the subsequent annual conferences opened space for the engagement on an annual basis with multiple stakeholders, academics, scientists, policy makers, and practitioners with interests in the Triple Helix model. The annual conference in Madrid, Spain (2010) was focused on the cities of knowledge and the expanding knowledge and connecting regions. The annual event in 2011 was held in the Silicon Valey, California, USA and shifted the emphasis to the gliobal aspects of the Triple Helix model, while the 2012 annual event in Bandung, Indonesia, extended the emphasis on developing countries.
The London event in 2012 brought the issue of open innovation and invited participants to challenge the Triple Helix model, while extending and deepening the application of the conceptuial aparatus, created as part of the evolution of the Triple Helix academic community. The large number of participants (over 300) from 35 countries indicated the emergence of a Triple Helix movement, anchored by the TH Association and spinning into numerous academic and practitioner domains.