Peers Around the World: Engineering innovation and trust to transform regional collaboration

In this month’s edition of our Peers Around the World series, where we hear from leaders in innovation from across our global network, we spoke with Tanyanauparb Anantana, Vice President at Chiang Mai University (CMU) and Director of the Science and Technology Park (STeP) at Chiang Mai University . He shared how his background in industrial engineering and his experience abroad has shaped his habit of mind and leading style to a different approach based in a strong structure, leaving room for creativity and trust.

Chiang Mai University’s Science and Technology Park (STeP) has grown into a hub for university–industry collaboration and regional innovation across Northern Thailand. Looking back, what have been the key milestones that shaped the park’s development into what it is today?    

When I look back to the very beginning, what strikes me most is how completely uncharted the territory was. When we started, Chiang Mai University had no mechanism, no unit, and no precedent for translating its academic wealth into real-world economic impact. We were building something that had never existed here before, and that was both terrifying and exciting. 

The first milestone was simply developing a working framework. We joined the IASP network back in 2011, and that decision proved foundational. It gave us access to global models, peer learning, and a set of principles we could adapt rather than invent from scratch. From that point, everything became about proving the model: putting it into practice honestly and rigorously enough to test whether it actually worked. 

The early success stories were small but essential. Products like the P80 longan extract and our Uniform Thermal Distribution of Radio Frequency technology (UTD RF), a registered patent of STeP, gave us something concrete to point to. In innovation ecosystems, proof of concept is everything, and those early wins told the university, the private sector, and the government that what we were doing was real and replicable. 

From proof came trust. And trust changed everything. Once researchers, industry partners, and government agencies began to believe in us, they started coming to us rather than the other way around. That shift in dynamic allowed us to amplify the model: expanding our team, building infrastructure, and scaling our services across the university and, eventually, the broader region. 

Today, the milestone I am most proud of is that STeP is no longer defined by its physical buildings. We have evolved from a gateway for university assets into a driver of area development, most significantly through our role in the Northern Economic Corridor (NEC). That is a transformation I could not have imagined at the start, and it is the result of every small step taken in the right direction over more than a decade. 

Your academic background includes industrial engineering and innovation management. How has this international and technical background influenced your leadership approach at STeP?

My academic background in industrial engineering gave me a habit of mind that I use every single day: I see the world as a system. Every challenge becomes an input-process-output question. Where is the friction? Where does the flow break down? How do we redesign the pathway so that the right outcome becomes inevitable? When I applied that lens to STeP, I stopped thinking of it as an institution and started thinking of it as a system to be engineered, one where the goal is to reduce the distance between knowledge and impact. 

My time in Japan shaped something deeper: a philosophy. Japanese innovation is not about disrupting the world in a single leap. It is about improving the quality of life for people, steadily, thoughtfully, and with great attention to craft. The discipline of Kaizen (meaning continuous improvement in everything we do) became a governing principle for how I manage our team and our programmes. And the Japanese aesthetic of beauty, harmony, and function influenced how I think about the STeP experience itself: it should be efficient, yes, but it should also feel welcoming, purposeful, and human. 

The combination of these two influences produced a leadership style I would describe as logic-driven but open-minded; disciplined but flexible; determined but always willing to listen. I bring strong structure to how we set strategy and measure outcomes, but I try to leave significant room for creativity and for the team to find their own path within that structure. The best ideas I have seen at STeP did not come from me. They came from people who were trusted enough to take initiative. 

Perhaps most importantly, my international experience gave me a genuine understanding of how business and innovation operate in the real world, not just in theory. That ground-level empathy for what entrepreneurs actually need, the pressures they face and the speed at which they must move, has shaped every decision I have made about how STeP should serve them. 

STeP operates as the hub of the Northern Science Park network, connecting 14 universities across the region. How do you see this regional collaboration contributing towards a stronger and more integrated innovation ecosystem in Northern Thailand?

The principle at the heart of our regional network is straightforward, but its implications are profound: pooled resources are exponentially more powerful than stand-alone efforts. 14 universities, each working in isolation, simply cannot match what 14 universities can achieve when they think, share, and act as a unified system. 

What we have built together is not just a coordination mechanism. It is an open innovation platform. Researchers and faculty from different institutions can now collaborate on challenges that are larger and more complex than any single university could address alone. A concrete example that I often share: coffee research (resulting in innovative "Coffogenic" health drinks) conducted jointly between the University of Phayao and Chiang Mai University combined forms of expertise that neither institution had in isolation and produced outcomes that neither could have delivered alone. That is the power of the network made tangible. 

Talent mobility is another dimension of this that matters enormously. When a company approaches the network with a challenge, they can draw on the full depth of the region's research capability, not just from the university closest to them. That changes the quality of what we can offer and the calibre of partnership we can create. 

But perhaps the impact I care most about is capacity building. The network systematically develops the people working in innovation across all 14 institutions, so that the strength of the ecosystem does not concentrate only in Chiang Mai but radiates meaningfully to every province in the North. Strong regional development, in my view, is not something that happens to a region from the outside. It is built from within, one capability at a time. 

Some of your publications examine how universities can act as “innovation intermediaries.” From your perspective, how do you translate these academic findings into practical actions that directly benefit entrepreneurs or industry partners?

My research on innovation intermediaries began as an academic inquiry, but its real test has always been a very practical one: does it actually change anything for an entrepreneur sitting across the table from me? The honest starting point is recognising what we call the 'Valley of Death', the gap between research and market where so many good ideas disappear. What makes that gap so difficult to cross is not usually a lack of technology or funding. It is a lack of translation. Industry partners and researchers operate at different speeds, speak different languages, and hold fundamentally different expectations. Without someone in the middle who understands both worlds, they often cannot communicate and nothing moves. 

At STeP, we translate our intermediary role into 3 practical approaches: Inside-Out approach, where we commercialise university IP and research outputs; Outside-In approach, where we bring real industry challenges into the university from day one; and the Startup approach, delivered through our Tech Business Incubation programme, guiding innovators from pre-ideation all the way through to full scale-up. Together, these 3 approaches ensure that we are not simply a gateway for knowledge — we are a complete innovation system that serves innovators at every stage of their journey. 

We have also learned the importance of matching the programme to the stage of the innovator. Our Basecamp24 programme is designed for entrepreneurs whose businesses are already established but who need to innovate and scale. We act as navigators, providing expert consulting, matching funding, and connecting them to our wider regional and international network. Our ‘builds CMU’ programme is designed for student innovators and early-stage startups, ensuring that promising ideas do not die in the classroom, but instead progress through prototyping, team-building, and real-market testing. 

The deepest lesson from both my academic research and my daily practice is this: the most valuable currency of an intermediary is trust, not infrastructure. Our most productive industry collaborations today grew from relationships that began years ago with a small, informal conversation. We have learned to invest in those early moments, not because they show up immediately in our KPIs, but because they become the foundation for everything meaningful that follows. 

With creativity, technology, and innovation becoming central to Chiang Mai University’s Science and Technology Park’s educational and research programmes, what changes do you expect to see in the future of learning and research, and how will these benefit the local community?

The most significant shift I foresee, and am already witnessing, is a fundamental change in the relationship between knowledge and action. For a long time, the dominant model was linear: universities generate knowledge, then transfer it outward. The future is far more iterative, collaborative, and community-embedded than that. 

In education, I expect us to move decisively from a teaching process to an Experiential Learning Platform. Students will build skills not by absorbing information in classrooms, but by working on real challenges sourced from industry, government, and community stakeholders from day one. STeP is uniquely positioned to enable this shift: we have live industry challenges, active intellectual property, and a community of startups that can serve as the real-world laboratory that the next generation of innovators needs. The distinction I care about is not just pedagogical. It is about agency. Students who learn by doing develop a fundamentally different relationship with innovation than those who learn by listening. 

In research, we are experiencing a paradigm shift from inside-out to outside-in. Researchers will increasingly begin with questions that communities and industries actually need answered, rather than defining their own problems and hoping the market eventually catches up. This produces faster, more relevant, and far more impactful research. It also changes the relationship between the university and the community, from one of expertise-to-recipient to one of genuine partnership. 

For the local community, the most meaningful outcome of these shifts is what I call inclusive innovation leading to inclusive growth. When innovation is co-created with communities, not delivered to them, the positive impact distributes across the entire value chain. It creates local employment, strengthens SMEs, and gives farmers, artisans, and entrepreneurs genuine participation in the economy being built around them. That, to me, is what a science park should ultimately achieve. 

As both an academic and an innovation leader, what continues to inspire you in your work? And what advice would you give to other science park leaders seeking to make a lasting impact? 

What continues to inspire me, above everything else, is the moment when innovation produces a tangible improvement in someone's quality of life. Not in the abstract, but concretely: a farmer who earns more because a better-processed product reached a new market; a young graduate who launches a company that employs people from their own community; a region that was once overlooked in national economic planning, now recognized as a centre of innovation and possibility. Those moments never lose their power for me. 

I am also motivated by the arc of the journey itself, from local to regional, and now reaching toward global connection. Being part of the IASP network is a reminder that the challenge we are working on in Northern Thailand is part of a much larger global conversation. When I meet international peers who are grappling with the same fundamental questions - how do we make knowledge serve people? how do we build trust between academia and industry? how do we create ecosystems that are both globally competitive and locally rooted? - it deepens my sense of purpose. We are not working on isolated problems. We are contributing to a global project. 

For other science park leaders, the most important advice I can offer is also the simplest: build a great team. Everything else - strategy, infrastructure, programmes, funding - depends on having people who are talented, trusted, and genuinely committed to the mission. Build your people before you build your programmes. Give them the clarity to know where you are going, the autonomy to find their own way there, and the safety to learn from what does not work. 

Beyond that: stay close to the entrepreneurs. They are the reason we exist. When we lose touch with their daily realities, the pressures, the uncertainty, the courage it takes to build something from nothing, we risk becoming institutions that serve themselves rather than the ecosystems they were created to support. And finally, stay curious. The field of innovation is changing rapidly, and the best science parks I know are learning organisations themselves. Read widely, visit your peers, ask the hard questions about your own model, and never stop looking for a better way.