The Tripartite Ecosystem Model reads an innovation economy as a trade network across three spheres. Education produces intellectual property, research, and work-ready graduates. Industry produces revenue, market validation, and capital. Governance produces policy, funding mechanisms, and legitimacy. Each sphere’s outputs are another sphere’s desired inputs, and the more frequent and complex the exchanges become, the more resilient the whole system is.
This is the model rendered in built form on the District page: community hubs at the centre that share and trade resources, energy, compute, food, talent, and knowledge, interfacing with all three spheres and binding them into a working whole.
The model was developed independently and later found to parallel the Triple Helix framework of innovation (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000), which addresses similar university-industry-government territory.
The full definition, including the extensions beyond Triple Helix, lives on the canonical entry at findcongwang.com.