Gorgun joins Teknopark Istanbul’s 2027-2031 strategic plan workshop

Defence Industry Agency (SSB) President Prof. Dr. Haluk Gorgun met the owners of companies based at Teknopark Istanbul during a strategic plan workshop covering the 2027-2031 period. The two-day session is intended to produce a five-year roadmap for the technology development zone.

Teknopark Istanbul General Manager Prof. Dr. Abdurrahman Akyol accompanied Gorgun through the programme. Four themes framed the sessions with companies: concentrating effort on critical technologies, converting ideas into products, building shared test and verification infrastructure, and helping firms scale and move into international markets.

Four themes, four bottlenecks

The agenda maps onto problems that have been discussed in Turkey’s technology parks for years. Concentration on critical technologies is meant to stop limited funding from being spread thinly across too many fields, favouring depth in selected technology clusters instead.

The idea-to-product theme addresses a familiar blockage: work that reaches laboratory maturity but stalls before it can be manufactured at series volume.

Shared test and verification infrastructure matters most to smaller firms. Qualifying a subsystem for defence or aerospace use requires environmental testing, electromagnetic compatibility work and endurance trials, and the capital cost of that equipment is difficult for a single small company to carry. Opening such facilities to shared use shortens development schedules directly rather than through incentives.

The fourth theme, scaling and internationalisation, concerns moving park-based ventures away from dependence on a single domestic customer and into international supply chains.

A centre designing international partnerships

Gorgun said the roadmap for the coming five years would be shaped during the workshop, and that Teknopark Istanbul would be positioned as a centre that designs international partnerships and carries technology ventures into world markets.

The formulation matches an approach the agency has emphasised recently. Turkish defence companies increasingly work through co-production arrangements, technology transfer packages and local assembly lines established in buyer countries, alongside direct product sales. Drawing small park-based firms into those arrangements as subsystem suppliers is seen as a way of widening the base of the export sector.

Growth backdrop

The workshop followed a day after the agency’s monthly export release. Figures Gorgun shared on 3 September put defence and aerospace exports at $511.4 million for August and $6.3 billion for the first eight months of the year, with the rolling twelve-month total at $10.9 billion.

In statements during August, Gorgun said domestic content in the sector had reached 83 percent and that the average age of its workforce stood at 34. Young engineering staff clustered in technology parks are among the main reasons that average sits where it does.

Sessions with companies are expected to continue on the second day, with the main headings of the 2027-2031 strategic plan due to be settled.

Sources: Hibya News Agency, Yeni Birlik