Our History
The first seed
The first seed for the creation of the Polo Tecnológico Rosario can be traced back to the Strategic Plan of of Rosario City, published in 1998 as part of the incorporation of Rosario City as a member of the Ibero-American Center for Strategic Urban Development (Centro Iberoamericano de Desarrollo Estratégico Urbano, (CIDEU – https://www.cideu.org/).
In this publication, the strategic axis titled “The city of creation” made reference to the need to elaborate a work program based on the foundation of a “Pole of technology and innovation”.
Two years later, exactly on September 8th 2000, a Memorandum of Agreement was signed and the Polo Tecnológico Rosario Group was formally created.
This document was signed by the following:
- the Municipality of Rosario City,
- the Government of Santa Fe Province,
- the City Council of Rosario,
- the National University of Rosario,
- the Austral University,
- the Libertad Foundation,
- and the private companies BLC SA, Grupo Consultar y Grupo Tesis.
From the beginning
We were granted the approval of the Statute, and the control authority of legal entities, the “Inspección General de Personas Jurídicas”, granted us the Legal Capacity. With these milestones, our civil association materialized in its mission and vision a distinctive feature of the institution: the public and private consensus.
Progress was made on developing associative projects as a distinguishing value, marked by the creation of the first group of software companies for the certification on the CMMI Quality Standards.
This experience opened up the path for generating a project of a much wider scope: the IT Quality Lab. The goal of the Lab is to provide services to new groups of companies searching to obtain certifications on norms of quality.
At the same time, we positioned ourselves as a relevant player in the tech ecosystem at a national level. In this area, we played a pivotal role on debates at different levels and in the National Forums on Competitiveness on the subjects around the acknowledgment of the software sector as an industry and on the approval of the Software Industry Promotion Act.
We made the strategic decision to include new tech sectors with a potential for creating synergies with the software sector, such as Telecommunications and Bio (Bioengineering and Biotechnology), which were incorporated gradually, giving the Polo a multisectoral tech profile.
The institutional goals were reassessed from a strategic perspective to address the new configuration and the new challenges at the regional context with the idea to dive deeper into positioning the Polo locally on innovation. In the same year, a new functional structure was created, with a greater operating capacity and participatory spaces of partners were generated on specific working committees. These changes made it possible to continue increasing the institutional activity level, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The inherent dynamics of the institutional growth and the relevance of the Polo as a strategic player in the city gave place to begin, in 2013, the construction works to materialize our own physical space, projected as an avant-garde Tech Node, driven by the collaborative innovation dynamics to produce technologies, scientific and educational activities, and the creation of quality jobs for the youth.
This marked the creation of the Tech Park – Zona i: an area of 5 hectares (2.47 acres) located in the south of Rosario, where the Tech Buildings are home of tech-base companies, a Maker Workshop, a coworking area and a multipurpose room with capacity for 300 persons.
Please click HERE to know more about Zona i.
We continue working to feed a model of innovation and development, of a high-value added production and specialization, which is sustainable in the long term and independent of the changing political and economic scenarios, thus reinforcing the technological development and positioning Rosario City both at the local and international levels.