In this essay, I draw on my experience in Shenzhen and my work as a former member of the Scientific Committee of the International Association of Science Parks (IASP), founded in 1984. In 1985, the Shenzhen Science Park was established through a joint agreement between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shenzhen municipal government. Five years earlier, under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, China had established its first four Special Economic Zones (SEZs). One was in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, directly adjacent to Hong Kong.

Science and Technology park in Nanshan District, wikipedia

China pioneered neither science parks nor modern SEZs. Stanford Research Park, established in the United States in 1951, was the world's first university research park. European examples include Sophia Antipolis, near Nice, conceived in 1969, and Cambridge Science Park, founded in 1970. Shannon, on Ireland's west coast, is widely credited with establishing the first modern free-trade zone in 1959.

China has been a follower that, in important respects, has outperformed the pioneers. Science parks and SEZs have helped propel its manufacturing and technology sectors to global prominence. In my view, cultural differences among the actors involved help explain this achievement. In parts of Europe, real estate projects and highly bureaucratic subsidy programmes have too often dominated; Shenzhen demonstrates the possibilities of urban-scale industrial ecosystems and agile policy experimentation.

As someone who witnessed the early development of the Shenzhen SEZ, I see it as an exemplary cultural story. The city has become a source and testing ground for new entrepreneurial concepts, acquiring the character of a Special Ideation Zone. Four cultural modes stand out.

A culture of welcome. Shenzhen has helped break down geographical and linguistic barriers, bringing together people from different regions of the country. Standard Mandarin has provided a shared language alongside local dialects. The city's openness to newcomers has widened the pool of people able to contribute ideas and build businesses.

A culture of education. Two pillars are urban environmental awareness and co-opetition: learning to compete while also cooperating. Competition, treated purely as a finite game, leaves a winner and a loser: those who bite win; those who are bitten lose. Co-opetition allows rivals to learn from one another and create opportunities together. These pillars contribute to a cultural edifice in which entrepreneurial ideas can take shape and be tested before successful approaches are disseminated more widely.

With robotics and artificial intelligence, education also means learning to see science as a social endeavour, developed within particular historical contexts and shaped by human institutions. Such an understanding can encourage a constructive, thoughtful engagement with new technologies.

A culture of bureaucratic speed. Intolerance of slow public administrative procedures accelerates business creation. Responsiveness to bottom-up entrepreneurship can guide the allocation of public resources, enabling rapid market entry and ongoing adjustments.

A culture of a start-up mentality. Business creators are celebrated. Those who fail should be able to get back up and start over. The value of this mentality lies in resisting the stigma of financial failure and the pillory of bankruptcy.

What lessons should European policymakers, and their counterparts elsewhere, draw from Shenzhen? Whether science parks or SEZs, their healthy development must be anchored in the behavioural culture that guides the use of property and finance. Shenzhen tells us: pay attention to human behaviour; it makes the difference and shapes how people use physical assets and financial resources.

Futian CBD in the spring of 1998 from Lianhuashan Park, wikipedia

I see a related outlook among Chinese students whom I have mentored, educated at the intersection of East and West. They are drawn to adaptive policymaking and local experimentation in frontier sectors. They also see possibilities for public-private risk sharing: public investment in laboratories, charging networks and other infrastructure can help firms pursue innovations whose initial costs might otherwise be prohibitive. For an Ideation Zone, the relationship between public support and entrepreneurial initiative deserves as much attention as the incentives offered to individual firms.

As public authorities and trade associations call for the creation or expansion of SEZs to attract investment, one wonders whether these zones can awaken communities from a creative slumber whose consequences are social even before they are economic. For this rebirth to occur, the zones must also become Special Ideation Zones (SIZs). Shenzhen offers a reminder that ideation combines imagination, prototyping and testing.

Can we rely on SEZs to keep manufacturing afloat? To answer this, we must consider the causes of their failures and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). A preliminary point: because SEZs mobilise public spending, we must carefully evaluate the criteria used to grant incentives to companies. Should pay disparities between senior managers and workers influence eligibility for public support? In the spirit of Adriano Olivetti's concern for workers and the wider community, should we ask how the benefits of investment are shared? Or should such questions be ignored?

The design and implementation of SEZs have distinguished China's economic development. Shenzhen, established as a zone to attract foreign investment and test new economic policies, is a prime example of success. Its rise as a global hub for high-tech innovation, finance and start-ups shows what sustained experimentation can achieve.

Copying and pasting does not guarantee success. Navigating the SEZ sea, projects can founder on the rocks of excessive bureaucracy, weak integration with the local economy and overreliance on tax incentives, especially in unfavourable business environments. The local conditions that made Shenzhen's development possible cannot simply be reproduced by giving another place the same designation.

AI adds another source of uncertainty. A June 2025 article by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, discussed in the Financial Times on 6 November 2025, contrasted a measured productivity boost with two extreme possibilities associated with a technological singularity: extraordinary abundance or catastrophe, including human extinction. These extremes were illustrative possibilities, not equally likely forecasts. For SEZs, the practical question is how to prepare people to work with AI and direct its applications towards useful ends.

A central driver of that preparation is investment in the education of young people. Economic historian Joel Mokyr, a 2025 Nobel laureate, has emphasised how the interaction between practical knowledge and scientific understanding helped sustain technological progress. Knowledge grows through experience of real situations and through the imaginative revision of what has been learned.

This is why SEZs must also be Ideation Zones, where educational institutions foster invention by stimulating students' creative and enterprising minds. Their work becomes the fruit of intellectual capital accumulated through study, experimentation and questioning established knowledge. Used to reorganise work and support higher-level tasks, AI could accelerate discovery and innovation in unpredictable ways, contributing to higher living standards. Some of the greatest economic benefits may depend on complementary investments in education, whose results are not immediate.

A long-term investment mindset is therefore crucial. Shenzhen experienced rapid growth in its early years, but its emergence as a mature innovation centre took decades. Early gains in output and investment are not the same as the accumulation of knowledge, skills and institutions that sustains development.

If the wait for results becomes a burden that extinguishes the willingness to move forward, we risk abandoning what takes time to build. We ask the policymakers and entrepreneurs advocating for SEZs: are the public and private sectors prepared to look beyond rapid results?

Shenzhen Bay Bridge, photographed in 2013, wikipedia

The manufacturing crisis cannot be countered by designing SEZs without attending to the four cultural modes described above. SEZs are no magic bullet for reviving struggling businesses or multiplying the tasks performed by digital workers. They remain vulnerable to the underlying problems that cause business failures. Their promise depends on the people who learn, experiment and create within them.