Medellin’s Ruta N is Targeted to Become One of LATAM’s Largest Tech Parks

Colombia is  building what is considered by some to be Latin America’s largest technology park. The “Ruta N” campus in Medellin will According to the Colombian news agency EFE, this is not a tech park but a “Science, Technology and Innovation District” and it covers three neighborhoods, home to more than 60,000 people. The government, according to the agency, will use the park to ‘coax large multinationals into setting up regional headquarters’ in the city.

The science and technology district is one of the many projects that the Colombian government has embarked on with an aim of turning Medellin into the ‘innovation capital of Latin America by 2021.’ The Medellín government has identified six business “clusters” to promote within the city: energy, construction, fashion, tourism, health care, and information and communications technology (ICT).

Last year, Medellin won the award of ‘the most innovative city of 2012’ in a competition organized by the Urban Land Institute, Citi Financial Group and Wall Street Journal Magazine.

Once dubbed the ‘murder capital of the world’, Medellin is today home to a large number of global technology companies. For an example, US technology giant HP has a global service center in Medellin.

A local construction company Ruta N Corporation has reportedly taken up the task of constructing the tech park. There are 14 foreign multinationals operating in one of the business parks run by the Ruta Corporation in Medellin, reported EFE quoting the company’s managing director Juan Pablo Ortega as saying.