From the alleys of New York to the fens of Cambridge, California's Silicon Valley – where the Internet revolution first took off – has always had imitators trying to define their own areas of high-tech growth and appeal. But Ipswich?

This town of 130,000 in the East Anglia region of England has had a distinctly agricultural image to date, reinforced by the "Tractor Boys" tag given to its football team, Ipswich Town (which has had a surprisingly successful season).

Yet through an initiative launched by the borough council and leading companies such as British Telecom, Ipswich is taking advantage of its postcode IP – also short for Internet Protocol – to bid for world renown as IP-City.

Julian Munson, IP-City's economic development officer, says: "Personally, I don't like the term 'silicon'. It's old-fashioned. IP stands for Internet Protocol, intellectual property and innovation park."

Unlike Cambridge, 50 miles away, Ipswich has no shortage of affordable land for expansion and the first such innovation park is IP8 on the south-west edge of the town.

Its antecedent is BT's Martlesham research labs, sited on an old RAF base outside Ipswich. The site has now been transformed into Adastral Park by Stewart Davies, head of the 3,000-strong BT ExacT advanced communications technologies research arm.

Davies thought up the new name and also originated the idea of IP-City with Ipswich Borough Council's chief executive, James Hehir. "We are changing the culture here and deriving more value out of the intellectual property developed over many years," he says of Adastral Park.

The complex has been opened up to other companies, such as America's Corning. An incubator – Brightstar – was launched last year to turn some of the thousands of patents developed by BT scientists over the years into established companies. Brightstar's Robert Walker says: "Ideas are not a problem here; the challenge is to convert them into successful businesses."

Brightstar has more than a dozen fledgling companies it hopes will grow into enterprises with market capitalisations of £100 million (€160 million) within two to three years. Truth Consulting and Venation have already left the nest for new offices in Ipswich.

The IP-City concept was launched almost a year ago after research revealed there were more than 200 high-tech companies in the area. The biggest are BT, Agilent Technologies and ntl.

Ipswich's selling points are its available land, skilled workforce, good connections and quality of life. It lacks a university, but University College London last week opened a research and postgraduate facility at Adastral Park. Peter Cochrane, former head of research at Adastral, says: "Ipswich has the potential to be another Cambridge; all that's needed is the real estate and the will."

Cochrane, who was behind a project seven years ago that linked London, Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich in an optical fibre diamond, left BT last year to set up ConceptLabs, a company that will fast-track R&D projects to market from its Ipswich base.

Cochrane says: "We're not seeing the speculative building and the science parks yet though. The commercial property market is attuned more to pig farmers than hi-tech, with six-year leases instead of floor space by the week. Otherwise, house prices are cheaper here than in Cambridge, and there are more PhDs per square metre with all the people at BT and Agilent."

Oliver Paul, at IT recruitment specialist Ifftner International, says there is no problem attracting well-qualified people to Ipswich: "IP-City and the 'Tractor Boys' are raising the profile of the town and we've found we can get graduates to come. Cambridge is too expensive, and they find a better quality of life here."

But there is a larger vision. Julian Munson says: "The top 19 high-tech clusters are all in the US, and Cambridge is at number 20. It can only move up by being bigger than itself. The eastern region of Cambridge, Ipswich, Norwich and Bedford maps nearly exactly on to that of San Francisco, San Jose and Silicon Valley. So that's what we're aiming at."