The Businessweek edition from November 30 featured an interesting story with the title “Innovation goes downtown“.

The article is framed around a new Science Park in Barcelona called 22@barcelona that I have been watching.

Downtown Parks are becoming development and innovation tools for City Development Agencies. It is true -as the article stresses- that talent does not depend on a physical location to create and innovate due to pervasive connectivity. Companies like Google use this and have adopted an HR strategy to go where the talent is rather than move the talent. In practical terms they do both as their R&D center in Zürich demonstrates. This makes sense because talented people  are increasingly global and willing to relocate to where the opportunities are. Anywhere.

Urban Science Parks will be a success and the key trend in City Development and Parks for the next decade, because young talented people excel in dynamic teams combined with high quality of life and social environment. I checked our system and concluded that most of the Science Parks we have currently listed in Western Europe meet the requirements of an Urban Science Park. I am sure there are many more that we do not yet know of. Please share your tips and ideas on this topic and Science Parks of the future with us.

These are our short term priorities to increase choice and intensify competition on our Business Location Marketplace:
1. Add Northern European countries this week
2. Add Eastern European countries in January
3. Increase the number of locations to 500 within weeks

With every new good business location on the FDI marketplace our global Internet ranking and findability in search engines increases day by day. More clients find the marketplace and find you!
We already have requests from Southern European locations, Africa, Middle East and North America. We will qualify all these opportunities and prioritize on the basis of market opportunity.

Does this all matter? YES

• We now have users from over 50 countries and most of these are YOUR clients
• We are about to complete our first fully successful Investor Matching with a Premium location on the FDI Marketplace – 7-digit €-investment

We move Location Promotion and Matching online.

In November we started to engage locations about our FDI marketplace and we started to contact new locations in Northern and Eastern European sub-regions . There are two potentially opposing findings from this work that I would like to share with you.
We often hear from locations that they are planning major online promotion and investor acquisition initiatives for 2010. The second finding indicates that there is a problem with the first; online innovation and related change of skills and capabilities are tough to implement. We based our second finding on our own experience engaging with the market. I want to share with you some of our experiences while starting our online services for locations on the Foreign Direct Investment marketplace:

1. Up to 50% of the agencies do not respond (timely) to information request emails addressed to email addresses published on their own promotion website
2. A substantial number of agencies cannot be easily reached by phone (getting through to the right person)
3. Almost all telephone conversations start with “I have very little time…”
4. I personally did not expect this one: “I do not think that my clients use the Internet to find locations”
5. Everybody wants to develop and promote Clusters but only a few meet the basic organizational and promotion requirements to be considered by Companies as real clusters
6. New-economy locations on average are more proactive, responsive and take decisions faster
7. It is difficult for promotion agencies or organization to master key principles and concepts of the Internet and to be able to create an online impact
8. Operational dependencies on Internet Providers make it hard to deliver users an engaging experience based on dynamic content (contract, governance, process not suitable)

Do you recognize the pattern of the key findings from the Worldbank Global Investment Promotion Benchmark studies?

I believe that it will a challenge for Intermediary Promotion Agencies and Location Promotion Agencies to join the online global competition because the challenges are often people and culture related. Global reach, impact and online services require a balance between culture, people, skills and capabilities. And yes money to. You cannot become a leading online agency if you do not commit a substantial spend of your marketing budget online. Research shows that many actually do not allocate over 10%? The culture and people aspects require focused change and training programs! Are you going to commit your organization to that change?

We created a set of Global Arena Guiding Services to help you transform your organization to a leading online location agency. We also cooperate with dedicated culture-change experts and our own digital full service media agency to be able to offer you a complete solution.

Today, november 9 2009 we are proud to announce that after 20 months of preparations and development we have launched our FDI Marketplace services at www.global-arena.com

It was 2003 when the foundation was laid for our Foreign Direct Investment marketplace. It all started when a contract was signed with the University of Ghent to develop what we now call GlobalArenaRank – our scientific ranking algorithm. We now have 7 years experience with GlobalArenaRank working for large multinational companies helping them analyse and select global business locations. We are proud to offer global companies of all sizes a unique and innovative online capability to help them explore business location opportunities that meet their unique requirements. Most important is that we are able to offer this service as a free capability to our clients – both companies searching for locations as locations promoting their advantages.

Today we start by offering our services in Western Europe. We have plans for rapid growth of the number of business location on the platform and expanding our geographic market coverage. Northern Europe will be added in November and the rest of Europe early 2010 as well as the Middle East and North Africa. We believe it is possible to cover over 5′000 business locations globally within two years of service.

After 20 months of development – based on our 7 years of experience – it is now time to let the market drive our future developments and direction. We have launched an ongoing campaign to encourage location and intermediary promotion agencies and to start working with their location profile. We hope and trust that our clients – both companies and agencies – will guide our future innovation and developments. To that point we really welcome your input and feedback on this blog or via our Contact page on www.global-arena.com

Thank you for your interest.

GlobalArena’s co-founder, Michiel Weimar visited the second Ecoregio 2020 (an initiative of the Euro region Tirol, South Tirol and Trentino) symposium held on October14 in Innsbruck, Austria.
This top quality event listed and explained several key projects that will strengthen the cooperation between the partners in this Euro regio.
Gross boarder projects like the Green Corridor (improvement of infrastructure, environment awareness, green energy along the Brenner North/South connection), increased cooperation in the area’s of health care, energy,education to list a few, were introduced.
 
In order to put this Ecoregio on the map of investors (the FDI marketplace) GlobalArena suggested to develop a promotion strategy along the following steps:0
1)Define the political feasibility  and charter of the projects
2)Define the key economic sectors to develop
3)List the decision criteria possible investors will use to determine where to invest
4)Based on a swot analysis define a decision factor improvement plan
5)Define a promotion plan with clear KPI’s
 
It became clear that GlobalArenas’ FDI marketplace  has the tools and experience to support the Ecoregio successfully